THE LAST WORD
Sanders, Scott R.
THE LAST WORD Scott R. Sanders Death of a Homeless Man This past winter, not long after Christmas, a man named John Griffin burned to death in South Boston. He was fifty-five, a veteran of the...
...So much should be obvious in a country that lights candles at the shrine of individualism...
...As it happens, one of those who passed by John Griffin's homestead almost daily (while jogging) was Boston Mayor Raymond FTynn...
...There is no such calculus, for the simple reason that suffering, like death, is personal...
...I cannot get beyond that charred body of John Griffin, those wristlets and anklets of cloth, those eloquent footprints in the sand, the quenching waters only a few paces beyond his outstretched arms...
...His most recent book is "The Paradise of Bombs...
...We brag to the world about valuing the sovereignty of self...
...So there you have it, the death of a homeless man...
...At this point a good journalist would tell you how many hundreds of thousands, even how many millions, of souls go to sleep cold and hungry and roofless each night in this rich land...
...I would ask what sort of help this Korean War veteran received for his alcoholism, where he last worked, what agency last trained him for a job, what doctor last examined him, what relatives or neighbors or church ever thought of taking him in...
...but you cannot work arithmetic on pain...
...Evidently Griffin had collapsed on his way to the water, for staggery footprints marked a trail back over the sand to his plywood hovel...
...Each of us meets it, or avoids it, inside the arena of his or her own skin...
...Indeed, indeed...
...Although I am thankful for those conscientious reporters, I am not any sort of journalist, good or bad...
...When I reflect on what my nation is up to, what it is achieving with all its huffing and puffing, I do not think about the Gross National Product or the Dow Jones Industrial Average...
...I think about John Griffin...
...You can tote up dollars or tons or kilowatts or spectators, and arrive thereby at a number that might be cause for boasting or lamenting...
...The mayor seems to be a compassionate man, and so I respect his grief as genuine, although it occurs to me Scott R. Sanders, who teaches literature at Indiana University, is a visitor this year at MIT...
...He was fifty-five, a veteran of the Korean War, an alcoholic, well-known and liked by his neighbors, who remembered him as a streetwise philosopher, a genial storyteller, gracious and kindly and full of song...
...Another who saw him regularly was a minister, Leonard Coopen-wrath...
...Mayor Flynn was quoted in the papers as saying, "It goes to show you that this country is not meeting the needs of people with physical and mental problems...
...The stock market seesaws wildly at news of a polyp on the President's colon, but does not so much as tremble over the incineration of John Griffin, would not tremble even if the suffering of all the jobless, homeless, futureless people in America could be added together by some calculus into a Gross Misery Product...
...No one could figure out what to do with Griffin alive, but they turned out in force to bury him...
...The GNP, as everyone knows, or should know, is gross indeed, including the price of Griffin's funeral and vodka while ignoring the value of his stories and songs...
...I'm all for respecting a man's desires, but if those include a preference for spending the Boston winter in a plywood lean-to instead of a public shelter, I think I would take a hard look at the shelter...
...He wanted to live basically apart from shelters and we must respect that...
...He dwelt at the center of an utterly private agony...
...His body, from which all the clothing had been burned away except for tatters at ankles and wrists, was found twenty feet from Dorchester Bay...
...I can share in it only faintly, through imagination...
...No one knows what set his clothes alight, whether a cigarette or the fire of twigs and cardboard he'd been using to keep warm...
...Both men described Griffin as a friend, and both attended his funeral, along with a cardinal, the police commissioner, the state secretary for human affairs, and other dignitaries...
...That is where the drive for change begins, unshielded by statistics or mansions, in empathy with those who suffer...
...As if in counterpoint, the Reverend Coopenwrath observed, "I don't think the system failed him...
...On the night of his death, John Griffin was cold, abandoned, most likely drunk, and, in the last few minutes, wrapped in flames...
...MARY ANN SMITH that the city of Boston, as the local portion of "this country," ought to shoulder part of the blame for Griffin's suffering...
...Instead of brooding on statistics about poverty, I keep seeing his little shanty cobbled together out of scavenged plywood, the cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles strewn on the ground...
...What we actually value is the right of (selected) individuals to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of community and planet...
...I am a novelist, snagged on particulars...
Vol. 51 • March 1987 • No. 3
