By Zack Mason
Published March 2024
Working a service job next to the encampment has been, at times, hard. Residents come in high and unwell all the time: my coworkers and I have been shouted at, spat on, and had things thrown at us. More importantly, we’ve been put in positions we are neither professionally, nor emotionally prepared to handle, like when people lock themselves in the bathrooms to do drugs.
In the past, I considered this to be a bleak reality of living and working in a city. As I’m sure most people have noticed, issues of homelessness, addiction, and poor mental health have become commonplace everywhere over the last few years. I considered a lot of my experiences with homeless people downtown to be a sad, but normal part of life. The terrible things I saw and continue to see blended into the landscape. In a way, they became acceptable to me because I accepted them.
My attitude shifted on November 16th 2022, when I received a text message from a coworker. She told me that a man had died on the GoTrain platform, and that she could see his body from her position behind the espresso machine. He died there in the night, and early that morning, the police came, taped off the scene, and wrapped the body into a black rubber bag. The cops wheeled the man’s shopping cart full of belongings to the train station dumpster where it sat for about a month, the number of things inside slowly shrinking, until it was tossed into a garbage truck and hauled away.
Now, I don’t know the circumstances of this man’s death, but I’m pretty certain that they weren’t peaceful. Whether he was attacked, overdosed, or froze, nothing about his death was what I would consider dignified. For me, the bottom line is that he was alone and in public. Unfortunately, I’ll never actually know for sure what happened: I scoured the internet for months following this incident and found nothing. Nothing in the news, nothing in public police incident reports. Nothing at all.
Over the following weeks, I became fixated on who this body was. I watched the shopping cart obsessively, and eventually built up the initiative to riffle through it. I found a piece of paperwork inside with a name that impossibly yielded no Google search results. Still curious, I brought the name to The Working Centre, only to find out that the man it belonged to was alive and well– his support worker had seen him recently. The body on the platform didn’t match the paper in the cart, and I was back to having no idea who this person was.
Later still, in preparation for writing this article, I walked down to the central division of the WRPS and asked the officer at the front desk whether there was any record of a body being found at the train station. Because the death wasn’t deemed suspicious, he told me, he couldn’t even confirm whether it had happened at all. It was like my co-workers and I were suffering from a mass hallucination. At this point the cart was long gone, eliminating the last trace of the death ever having happened.
This incident opened my eyes to a problem I find hard to negotiate. In a culture that generally touts compassion and connectivity, the people living at our margins go by largely voiceless. The issues I see include the pragmatics: people are living on the streets, they are unwell, poor, sick, and suffering. However, the part that bothers me even more is that these people are ignored by the general public. Many of us (myself included) have passed someone high on the curb and scratched our heads, thinking “how do people let themselves fall so far?” The truth is that a person doesn’t just wake up one day and decide to live on the streets. It happens incrementally by a combination of bad luck, poor decisions, and systemic failures, blends of bad luck and poor decisions. There is a seed of dysfunction within a person’s life (this could be poor mental health, bad social ties, drugs, whatever) and as that seed grows, the person’s support systems– their friends, co-workers, family members, communities– start to slip away (if they were really there to begin with). Desperate for peace, happiness, pleasure, love, comfort, the list goes on, that person may gradually turn to more dysfunctional means to feel better. This is when drugs, for example, might come into the picture. The issue is cyclical: the further into dysfunction you fall, the more isolated you become and the harder it is to live in society with others.
The people living in the encampments are there because at this point in their lives, they have nowhere else to go. The encampments are a place of marginalization and isolation that deepens dislocation. Often, living in an encampment results in identities get mixed up, obscured, lost. I witnessed a death go largely unspoken. For the last 20 odd years, The Working Centre has been writing to memorialize this reality and I want to add to that tradition. I want to talk to the people in the encampment and offer the opportunity to tell their stories, not just record their deaths, but their day to day lives.
Our homelessness crisis is a symptom of a sick, disconnected community. I believe that communities are built, both on the stories they tell, and the ones they refuse to tell. When we know one another, we become closer to each other, we inspire empathy, we inspire action.
The Working Centre, along with many community partners, work to support people facing the challenges of poverty, homelessness and a poison drug supply. In our community, we hold a tradition of naming each person who has died, remembering their spirit, and marking their loss.
Zack Mason is an aspiring writer who grew up, lives, and works in downtown Kitchener.
