Job Lost to Injury, and a Struggle for a Home

NEW YORK TIMES
By ELISSA ELY, M.D.
He lost his apartment two years ago, after losing his job. He lost his job after falling off scaffolding in an unacknowledged industrial accident. The company lawyer does not answer his phone calls. Now he has chronic pain, a hand like a claw and a bed in the homeless shelter.
My patient likes to talk about the apartment he used to have, and the honest satisfactions of a home. He liked taking his shower after work, watching his TV. He had a girlfriend who tidied the place from time to time. He took the bus to and from work and said that whenever someone was missing bus fare, he would reach into a pocket and supply it. It felt good, like buying everyone a round. He was not a drinker, but altruism was something he enjoyed.
He especially liked his apartment key. But no job, no key. At first, he slept in a condemned building; it gave comfort, and the illusion of a home: there were doors to walk through. After the building was demolished, he came to the mental health clinic. He had all the profound symptoms of depression one would expect. He understood that antidepressants take weeks to work, and dutifully accepted that fact. He was willing to be patient.
By then, he had a permanent bed in a shelter, which is as close to security and keys as homelessness gets. There was a locker for his clothes, a washer and dryer, the same sheets each night, mostly the same neighbors — a regimen to count on.
He was inconvenienced, but not bested. Homelessness, as he saw it, was a temporary state. Sleeping in an assigned bed would do while he waited for public housing. Because of his years of work, he qualified for Social Security disability payments, and he had no reason to believe that the monthly stipend would not cover an apartment. He got himself on a list.
The list was long. After a year or so, he found himself drinking. It was a comfort he could not resist. Six months later, he got into a fight at the shelter — not his fault, he argues — and lost his permanent bed. He was barred from the shelter, and descended into the rougher layer of shelters, where drinking and drugs are commonplace, there is no daily shower and residents have to stand in line for a different bed each night.
He began to look blunted, blank. This is what two years without a key will do to a man. The medication was no help. You can’t live in an antidepressant bottle.
That was when he decided to build himself a house. He came on some land deep in the woods, not too far from the shelter where he had started out. He was still handy, if no longer employable. Using tree stumps and branches, and his one good arm, he fashioned a kind of lean-to.
He says he lies in it and can see the stars in the roofless sky. There is no heat or electricity, of course, and the house is not structurally safe, but he doesn’t mind. He looks up, and hours pass. In the dark, lying on the floor looking up, he begins to feel the absence of grief, of anger. He feels the blessing of no feelings at all.
The medication is still not working. It won’t work, when his need is for a key. He has begun to talk about train tracks and the uselessness of life. He says one day he may not return to the clinic. He won’t tell me where his house in the woods is, though for now he continues to visit it. It offers respite from the anxiety, rage and heartbreak he faces in the shelter.
Feeling nothing, he says thoughtfully, is almost like feeling peace.