Dee’s in the Hospital — Safe for Today

This morning I got a call from Dee Dee. She has been in the hospital since Friday — the day she was hit by a car as she crossed the street.

My guess is that Dee’s eyes were down — she probably didn’t look both ways … didn’t notice the light was red … didn’t hear the car coming because she is half deaf.

The doctors kept her for several days because she suffered a head injury (the first of many in her 62-year life). They also noticed the highways of painful varicose veins that crisscross both legs. They checked her from head to toe — I know she hated that! — and gave her pills and vitamins and instructions and encouragement.

Today she will check out and go to a local shelter where she can recuperate. After that, she will return to the airless, filthy apartment she calls “the dump.”

Dee Dee and I think the few days she spent at the hospital were pretty good days all in all. Three hots and a cot, people checking up on her, smiling, plumping her pillows.

It’s sad to think the hospital was more “home” than her own home. My own hope is that KCRM’s new women’s center becomes home for the women like Dee — whose eyes are turned downward, whose thoughts are confused, who can’t always hear or see the hope ahead.

Women Who Can for Women Who Can’t

Dee stands only four feet and a few inches tall.  At 62, she looks like a small, very grumpy bulldog, with a deeply lined face, military-cut hair, and eyes she tends to keep fixed on the ground.  Dee nervously picks at her fingernails and face — sometimes until she draws blood.  She walks for miles each day, and the veins in her legs are criss crossed and painful.  She keeps her eyes to the ground when she walks, to avoid peoples’ eyes and to look for money, doodads and other cool stuff.

Dee has been diagnosed with several mental disabilities, but she is incredibly street smart. She’s had to be to survive a hundred harrowing experiences that range from having her children taken from her at birth to simply walking the wrong KC streets late at night.

Though she usually has her own apartment, she is often driven out by her own paranoia to stay in shelters or abandoned buildings.  No matter where she lives, she insists someone is trying to break in, to molest her, to take her things … no place feels safe.  No place feels like home.

Her response to all this is to sabotage her housing — fail to pay her rent or utilities, pick fights with other residents, get thrown out.  Last year, she spent five months in local shelters, under bridges and in abandoned buildings.  ”Dee, did you feel safer under a bridge than in your apartment?” I ask.  ”Well, yeah,” she says.  ”Better’n gettin’ broke into.  Or gettin’ messed with in my sleep.”

Staying in shelters where there are children is a struggle for Dee.  Her paranoia, hearing loss, abrupt and abrasive responses, and fear of being touched conspire with her sadness at the loss of her own children, making her seem freakish and dangerous.  (She is neither.)

Dee has been my good friend for 28 years.  We’ve had a rollicking strange relationship; sometimes we come out swinging, but we own too much of each others’ hearts to let go for long.

I believe that KCRM’s women’s center will be a place of refuge for Dee and for women like her.  Women who’ve suffered unimaginably; who don’t look like “us” or behave very well at times.  Women who just, for whatever reason, can’t make life work.

In the coming months, as Kansas City Rescue Mission pulls together the resources to open our new women’s center, I want to call on “WOMEN WHO CAN” to be there for “WOMEN WHO CAN’T.”  To be there financially, with volunteer time, with hours of prayer, with hands that cook, decorate, sooth, clean, love and encourage!

If you can love the Dee’s of this world, you are a WOMAN WHO CAN.  And KCRM needs you as never before.