I went to the adult
congregate living facility to see my old friend Charles last week. It had been
too long since I’d been to see him but trips out of the country and sea changes
in life had kept me too occupied to be properly attentive to this dear man in
his nursing home.
I had a strange sense of
apprehension as I walked up the well-manicured driveway to the facility.
Definitely one of the nicer versions of G-d’s waiting room, it is a relief not
to be greeted by the smell of ammonia which reveals a facility to be a 60
patient bed pan. I asked which room Charles was now in. The receptionist gave
me the name of another patient. I repeated his name: Howard Charles Miller.
After a moment of searching,
she said to me he had been discharged June 22. A wave of despair swept over me.
“To where?” I asked, knowing even as the words left my lips that she couldn’t
tell me. I wasn’t a blood relative nor did I have legal guardianship. Charles
was just my friend. His right to privacy now had insured that he had
disappeared into the night.
I planned to call his case
worker on Monday to see if I could track him down. But then I remembered the
colostomy I found he had had implanted the last visit, a surprise to me. He
couldn’t remember how that got there. Indeed, he couldn’t remember much of
anything beyond my name and our long friendship.
With a very uneasy feeling,
I came home and did a google search in obituaries. There I found Charles.
7/7: Deaths in
Central Florida
HOWARD CHARLES
MILLER,
71, Altamonte Springs, died Friday. DeGusipe Funeral Home and Crematory,
Maitland.
Charles was gone. And he had
died alone.
Omnipresent and Ever Stinky
I had met Charles at St.
Luke’s Cathedral where I once hung out in the days before it lost its mind to
the fundies and sold it soul to the suits. Charles was wiry, had a mop of medium
length curly greying brown hair that flew out in every direction. He was legally
blind and wore Coke bottle glasses that were completely opaque on one side, the
result of his loss of an eye to glaucoma a couple of years earlier.
He took medication for the
remaining eye prescribed by the aging doctor nearing retirement who accepted
Charles’ medicare. The medication had a slight psychotropic effect on Charles.
Already one of the more disinhibited human beings I’d ever met, Charles would
often say things that made me wonder if he’d put in more than the prescribed
number of drops that day. In all honesty, most people thought he was crazy. But
if you listened carefully, he not only made a lot of sense, but he had an
amazing insight into a world he could only observe from the margins.
The other aspect of Charles
that was almost immediately evident upon meeting him was that he had lost his
sense of smell somewhere along the line. His often mismatched cast off clothes
he had bought from every thrift store in town or received from well-intentioned
people anxious to be rid of old clothing were often smelly. That was
particularly true when they heated up in the hot Florida sun during his daily
cross-town treks.
Charles lived in Section 8
housing, a project called Reeve’s Terrace right down the street from us
alongside the expressway. He had no washer or dryer and rarely could see well
enough to negotiate the street down to the complex laundry. He washed his
clothes in his own dingy bathtub and hung them on the line in the back of his
apartment to dry. Rained on and often left for days to dry, the mold that grew in
his clothes became high potency fuel for a green, pungent cloud that preceded
Charles most warm Florida days.
When I came to pick him up
for an event, I would often say to him, “Charles, honey, you have to go change
this shirt.” He would often apologize, telling me he had washed this shirt, which
always made me feel awful, but I didn’t want people to avoid talking with him
because of an odor he was unaware of. And he was always willing to change it.
Despite his lack of vision,
Charles was able to negotiate the poor excuse for a city bus system this
metropolitan area of over 2 million provides with an expertise that was
amazing. He knew the lines, the schedule and the connections by heart and often
served as a walking kiosk for fellow bus riders trying to make connections.
“That’s the 13 bus. It does downtown every half hour,”
he’d say.
Between buses he would
simply walk. I would see Charles all over town and way out into the suburbs,
anywhere the bus lines went. When I would spot him on the sidewalk, I’d simply
pull over, open my door and say, “Charles! Get in!” He would always hop right in with a great big
grin and offer his characteristic greeting, “Hello, Little Brother!” And though
he would always protest that I was going out of my way to take him where he was
going, I always took him there, often lying about the fact that it would
probably make me only a little late for my own appointments.
A Case Study in Survival
What I learned about Charles
over the years was that he was an amazing survivor. One of five children born
to an impoverished family in Brooklyn, he had become the ward of the State of
New York at the age of eight when his mother, whose last name he did not bear,
became ill and eventually died of cancer. His loss of vision had been gradual,
the result of too much oxygen in his incubator as an infant. Charles fondly
remembered riding bicycles as a child but by the time he was a young adult and
sent by his local Seventh Day Adventist church to the SDA Forest Lake Academy
in a suburb of Orlando, he was already legally blind.
The New York City foster
care system had been a nightmare for Charles. He was placed in eight different
foster care placements. In two of them he was sexually abused including by a
pastor of a pentecostal church who then had the audacity to try to cast the
demons out of Charles that had caused the pastor to sin. In almost all of his
placements he was physically abused which taught Charles a lot of street
smarts. But his tough exterior shielded an incredibly soft heart, a deeply
rooted spirit and one of the most curious, imaginative minds I have ever
encountered.
Charles loved animals and
people. He loved to come to our home for dinner and often would play our piano
from memory. He was well versed in gospel hymns and one of my favorite memories
is Charles playing hymns after a big Thanksgiving dinner and my entire family
and guests gathered around singing, a family custom that dates back to
my earliest memories.
Poor Charles sometimes
couldn’t see well enough to avoid stepping on our animals to their immediate
protest. He always felt so miserable after that even when we tried to reassure
him it was OK, it was just an accident and that our dog or cat was fine. One of
our dogs was particularly afraid of being stepped on. I noticed that upon
occasion Bette would suddenly disappear from our living room and hide under our
bed for no apparent reason. Within seconds I could hear Charles coming up our
driveway singing or talking to himself. We began to realize that her hiding was
the early warning system for a Charles visit.
We never told Charles that.
He also loved all things
spiritual. His interests ranged from the psychic mediums of nearby Cassadega to
the Hindu Temple on South Orange Blossom Trail. He had visited virtually every
church of every denomination in downtown Orlando and could tell you much about
the place, the crowd, its leadership and its theology. He was a quick study on
all things theological and spent hours in the public library on the computer
which could enlarge the print enough for him to read page after page of
medieval history and various other religious topics.
Part of what I will remember
Charles by is the innumerable plastic rosaries and paperback books on icons and
cathedrals he purchased for me at the library’s used book store. Charles taught
me that it was important to receive with grace whatever gifts poor people can
give you. After all, it is all they have to give and it affirms their human
dignity in the process.
In all honesty when he got
on a roll about the medieval church, I thought he was making some of it up. He
often spoke of obscure religious orders and I never knew if it was actual or simply
one of the many aspects of the local chapter of the Society for a Creative
Anachronism (SCA) that he attended with regularity as “Brother Theophilus,” the
monk whose name meant “lover of G-d.” Brother
Theophilos was a favorite among the SCA people he met working in the cook tent
serving food, a task a limited sight person could handle with ease.
Ironically, one of the
sadder aspects of this incredible man’s life was his fear of the afterlife.
Between his long years in conservative religious foster homes and his days with
the Adventists, Charles had come to fear judgment and eternal damnation,
particularly as he began to come to terms with a sexual orientation that, like
most other aspects of his life, fell outside the norms of a heteronormative
culture.
I spent many hours trying to
assure Charles that G-d loved him as he was, that if anyone would be going to
heaven it would be him. Indeed, I have run into few human beings with a purer
heart than this man and if Jesus is right, he’s one of the lucky ones who will
actually see G-d. I often prayed that he would come to accept that before his
death. No one deserves to die in a state of religiously induced fear,
particularly not this man.
[Continued]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott
Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined
life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious
or political, is not worth holding.
For what does G-d
require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with
your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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