DOCTORS' LOUNGE
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STEALING HOME AUTHOR Mary Barry, MD
I wrote this 14 years ago, after Hurricane Ka-
trina had devastated the Gulf Coast. I was
thinking about homeless people this morning,
huddled up as usual under the Main St. over-
pass. I see them nearly every day on my way to
morning rounds. We need to build them fields of
tiny homes. We need to employ the graduates of
The Healing Place as their advocates and guides
to homesteading, since many of them have walked this walk in the
past; they have learned how to navigate networks of social resources.
Having a home is better than stealing one.
This article was previously printed in Louisville Medicine Volume
53, No. 7, December 2005.
I
n Pass Christian, in Gulfport, in Cameron Parish, in Port Arthur,
in the Ninth Ward, Christmas will never be the same again.
What used to be there has been destroyed, or flooded, or by
now, bull-dozed. In Cozumel, in Havana, in the mud-obliterated
villages of Ecuador, what used to be home is still, for thousands,
unrecognizable. In Muzaffarabad and most of Kashmir, an un-
imaginable death toll of more than 80,000 people, just from the
shocks, has risen daily because of the cold and the lack of everything
essential—food, water, medical care, shelter. Not a hospital remains;
hardly a building there stands undamaged.
Those who survived to celebrate Christmas have lost so much.
They have lost the corner of the living room where the tree looked
best, and the snowflake ornament so carefully handed down through
generations. They’ve lost the Christmas morning pictures from
when the kids were little, and the ones from their grandmother’s
holiday table, where the aunts, uncles and cousins were all laughing
at Uncle Jim. They’ve lost some of those relatives, now. They’ve lost
their streets and their churches and their neighbors and their pets.
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
They’ve lost the sense of normalcy that makes a holiday so special,
because it’s outside the daily grind. They’ve gone from standing
on the I-10 overpass to staring at a hotel television in Texarkana,
waiting for FEMA to answer their phone.
People are homeless every day, here in Louisville, and all over
the world. Other people care about them all year, and work to help
them change the things that took their homes away. Some of us may
write a check for United Way, take lots of clothes to Goodwill and
the Salvation Army, and take care of them, when they land in the
hospital. The cops and the mission volunteers try to round them up
when the cold turns bitter, but every year some stubborn or psychotic
holdout will freeze, down on the river bank in January. We’ve met
them, in the clinics, at The Healing Place or on the corner of First
and Market. We can imagine their lives a bit. We can begin to get
our minds around their individual disasters.
But homelessness on the catastrophic scale of 2005 is another
matter. The only way to get our minds around it is to break it down
to each person involved. What we can imagine, for those who’ve
lost so much, is what they’ve still got: a will, a soul, a voice, a pair
of hands to work with. What they still have is the essence of them-
selves, their memories, their beliefs and their self-respect. They can
never recover the people and the places they have lost. They can
only recover what they remember and hold dear in their hearts.
Not the tallest storm surge can wash away the feeling of a mother’s
arms, or the rush of happiness when the front door swings open
and the whole family is waiting inside.
Sometimes, you just can’t get home. Sometimes, in your mind,
you have to steal home.
Dr. Barry will begin a part time “float/fill-in” only position at various Norton CMA
offices in February.