Over the past several years, I’ve led a worship service at Patchwork that recognizes people who have died in the last year who were connected to Patchwork in some way. I usually lead this service around November 1, All Saints Day. This year it was on October 27.
Every year, the list includes an eclectic mix of folks including volunteers, guests, clients, neighbors, old friends, and legendary characters from all points in Patchwork’s history. Every year it is a joy to celebrate the people who come together here and who influence the place that Patchwork has become.
I know that my list does not include everyone because it’s limited to the people that I happen to hear about. I know of some folks’ passing because they have stayed connected to Patchwork through the years. Some I catch through an obituary in the paper. A few are mentioned to us by friends or family who know we’ll appreciate hearing of the death. Occasionally, I’ll catch a name in the list of death notices in the newspaper.
I know that there are most likely others, and I suspect that many of these others are among our morning regulars. They are often people who don’t get obituaries or whose families would never realize the impact that they had here. We see them daily or weekly for years and then they disappear. We worry about them and miss them and wonder where they are.
Such was the case with Matt, who was a regular around Patchwork for years. He always enjoyed conversation. He was someone who once suggested to me that people might be hesitant to talk to a homeless person because they feel like they don’t know what to say. He suggested that they could talk about the weather. He also walked into the main office one day and handed Shawn a squishy, purple ball. She looked at him, a little confused. He told her, “There you go! Now you can’t say no one has ever given you a purple ball!” He was correct.
Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for a stretch, but then he’d stop by again to let us know he was doing well. Then we went an entire year without seeing him. We hoped he was ok. We asked around to find out if anyone else had seen him. No one could confirm they’d seen him recently. We even scanned death notices to see if he’d appeared there. Nothing. He was a mystery.
So there I was a few weeks ago, descending the stairs at the library with an armload of books filled with poetry on death and dying to help me prepare for my service of remembrance when I glanced at a man passing me and realized it was Matt!
I think he was surprised by my surprise. He’d been around all this time, just not at Patchwork. I told him we have missed him. He said he’s sorry that he hasn’t been able to stop by. He said he has been staying a little further out and hasn’t been able to get to Patchwork early enough in the day. He said does need to stop by to say hello again. He said he misses the peace and calm at Patchwork.
In my search for elegies, I found Matt, a guy who is not dead.
During my service of remembrance, I followed this reflection on the living and the dead with a quote from Toni Morrison:
“It’s a nice big fat philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it’s not a compelling idea. It’s predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody’s attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”