THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

I was walking my usual 9 p.m. loop around the senior center when someone bundled in layers leaned over the fence and shouted my name. Without my hearing aids, it took a moment before I realized who it was—a woman in her fifties whom I’d helped in small ways for years. She’s about forty pounds lighter after her prison diet.

Her aging mother lives in my neighborhood with her great-grandkids, the grandchildren of this homeless woman, which is why she circles the area like a ghost. But her mother, worn down by her daughter’s emotional—and often psychotic—outbursts, after sheltering her repeatedly for a time, had her arrested and thrown out.

Here’s that homeless woman again, hovering locally, hoping for just a glimpse of the grandchildren she loves.

I felt a stab of guilt for not doing more but I handed her five dollars so she could take the trolley into town and get some food stamps.

What she told me next made my chest tighten. She’s been stuck in the jaws of a flawed system for 12 years

She just spent six months in jail for violating the trolley ticket requirement. One slip—one ride she couldn’t pay for—sent her back behind bars. But jail offered regular meals, a warm roof over her head, and group showers.

And we call this a “system.”

We warehouse the mentally ill in jails, release them without treatment or training, and then wonder why they end up back on the streets–or back in a cell — or violent. She needs mental-health care, job training, and transitional housing. Instead, she’s thrown into the cold on a November night with a frigid January coming.

I asked where she’d sleep tonight.

“In the bushes over there,” she said, pointing to a fence. No mattress. No blankets. No toiletries. No shower. No morning coffee. Just her in a flimsy jacket, her lying on the cold, damp dirt with a few thin shrubs for shelter.

I glanced at my watch—an instinctive, shameful gesture—and said I had things to finish at home. I said my goodbye and walked away … distracted, … disturbed, … replaying her anxious voice in my head.

I wondered how my own ten years of homelessness hadn’t ended up in the same spiral.

My father’s words came back to me as I reached my door:

“There but for the grace of God go I.”

If this is how we treat vulnerable humanity—if this is the best we can do—then the failure isn’t theirs.
It’s ours. And it is way past time to say so out loud and do something that solves this growing social problem.

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