At Kate's Rest, we believe that safe housing is a necessary foundation from which people can begin that journey. It does not, by itself, erase the experiences that brought someone to our door. Our role is to provide a safe and supportive home, walk alongside our residents through their challenges, and help connect them with the resources and services they need.
Some journeys are long. Some are marked by setbacks. And some end far too soon.
We remember David and his brother not for how they died, but for how they lived—and for the love, humour, companionship and humanity they brought to our community.
A Small Paper Bag Filled with Love and Grief….
I was cleaning my room this weekend and moving books on my shelf when a brown paper lunch bag, folded and filed between the books came tumbling to the floor. The bag was adorned with colourful cuttings from magazines that had been neatly glued to the outside. A red sports car and an Arctic wolf suckling her young pups on the one side, with Saturn and Jupiter taking up the other. And a name written neatly across the top of each side in permanent red marker. David.
As I retrieved the bag from the floor I was once again touched by grief. David had lived here at Kate’s Rest with his brother for many years. He was, during his time here, a devout alcoholic with vodka consumed straight from a 26er as his drug of choice. We had travelled together, him and I, since his coming to Kate’s Rest in 2013 and we dealt with many of his challenges from legal, to mental health, and even to his reluctantly accepting a pet dog named Koda. Koda was good for him and soon became the centre of his life, after his brother. The three were inseparable. One fall I was able to help him enter a three-week rehab program to recover from his alcohol addiction. It didn’t have the results that we had hoped for, but he did have some of the written materials that he had created, like the bag, that he would review from time to time.
In the bag were some slips of paper, marked again with the same neat handwriting. “I used to be addicted to cocaine and crack”. It’s not unusual for some of our friends who live here to have multiple addictions, with alcohol and cigarettes as being seen as the more socially and legally acceptable of addictions. “My mother’s side of the family is extremely well-off financially”. The affliction of homelessness is not simply of people who are from impoverished families. “I used to be a runner for a motorcycle club”. For David, there was both shame and pride in this admission. He had earned the right to belong to a group that gave him identity and purpose, even if it was criminal in nature. He had suffered immensely for this association. “I was from an abusive family. My father was a drunk and very abusive mentally and physically.” This gets to the core of the matter for many of my friends. They were greatly harmed as children and then escaping that criminal abuse they would find themselves on the streets only to be shown great prejudice and neglect. David was the older brother and he took pride in how he cared for and protected his younger brother on the street. Never able to access health care on their own, alcohol became the manner by which they self-medicated the trauma and deprivation.
In January 2022, David’s younger brother, living with him at Kate’s Rest, had a massive stroke and died a week later in ICU. David could not accept the loss. He drowned himself in vodka, was taken by ambulance to the Picton emergency department in January, 2022 where he stopped breathing. Though they revived him, the damage done to his brain was deadly. Six weeks after his brother’s death, David died as well. He was 39 years old.
The paper bag holds a few of the clues of his struggles in life. Like everyone here, I loved the brothers and miss them both tremendously.
