Bitter Night

Down to about 17 degrees F. (-8 C) and snow falling off and on throughout the day. This is definitely not the White Christmas I’d dream about if I were dreaming about one. The local/Vancouver news today is all about the homeless woman who died last night on a Vancouver street when the tarp-covered shopping cart she was sheltering under caught fire, apparently from a candle she lighted to try to provide herself with some warmth. Even though she was 42 years old, one’s mind goes to the Little Match Girl. Apparently the police had been in contact with her earlier in the evening and had urged her to go to one of the shelters, but she had refused and they judged her not to have mental problems and accepted her refusal.

We used to discuss this genre of problem frequently in my bioethics days: how far do you let people go in risking their lives? Great champions of patient autonomy, one and all, we would nod sagely that people have to be allowed to do what they want to. In the brief period when I was pitching bioethics stories to TV people, in fact, I almost sold a script based upon the story of a real-life, 8-months-pregnant woman living in an urban park near the university hospital where I worked. In real life, I thought she ought to be able to stay there, but in real life, the physicians at the hospital thought she shouldn’t and were happy to be convinced that she was endangering the life of another (the unborn child) as a result of either her mental illness or her failure to understand her situation and were happy to force her into the hospital.

Well, I probably was a stronger believer in letting people do what they wanted to in those days, but even then I talked to some people who worked with the homeless to find out why they insisted on staying in the streets even when there were shelters. Los Angeles homeless workers told me it was largely because the shelters were not, in fact, safe; that women, in particular, were preyed upon in the shelters by other homeless people after the lights went out.

So my response to the Vancouver situation is why wouldn’t this woman want to be indoors when it is 17 degrees F? She wasn’t out there because she was enjoying the brisk evening air. And now, everyone is appalled to hear of her death and appalled to think that the police didn’t have the legal authority to take her to a shelter against her will. No newsperson I heard today even asked why she wouldn’t have gone to a shelter. Isn’t that the question and the problem we should be addressing and correcting, not whether her autonomy should be respected? I’m pretty doubtful that homeless persons anywhere when the temperature is substantially below freezing are engaged in practicing their autonomy by risking death by hypothermia.

Point Roberts, as far as I know, does not have anyone homeless there. I suppose it is not so much because we are so kind-hearted and compassionate but because the homeless don’t have passports so they can’t cross the borders to get there. Here in B.C., on the Sunshine Coast, I suspect there are homeless people. The only ones I’ve ever heard about, though, were living up in the near mountains where it seems more like they are camping out than staying alive.

We don’t think about the homeless much, and especially when one comes from a warm climate like Santa Monica has. Up here on the border, though, it is not so warm, and right now it is unusually cold, so homelessness is a regular news story in the winter. I hope everyone who heard about that woman’s death last night thought about the homeless today and what they are going through. There was a homeless woman underneath a bridge as we drove up to B.C. on Wednesday. Her name was Dora. She was asking for money from people in cars driving onto the freeway from the corner she was standing on . I hope she’s still alive tonight. I hope she’s in a shelter. I hope she’s safe. But I know that most of us won’t be thinking about these people a week from now when the weather gets above freezing. Richest countries in the world; people freezing or setting themselves on fire in the streets trying to keep from freezing.

I don’t think it was anyone’s personal duty to keep her alive; I’m not looking to allot blame. But this is a civilized society and I genuinely don’t understand why we can't do better than this.