Housing Spotlight

Dana gets to worry about Dana

STORY AND PHOTO BY HANNAH HERNER

“Welcome to my home!”

Dana opens the door to her pristine efficiency apartment, complete with lit candles and a border of meticulously filled in coloring pages of pets in dress clothes, posted up with scotch tape.

Dana finally gets to worry about Dana, after years of caretaking.

“I’m free now. It’s all about me now” she says. “I can make my own decisions. Think about where I want to go. If I don’t want to go anywhere I don’t have to go anywhere.”

If you frequent Downtown, you may recognize Dana, and you most definitely saw her with Jon “Pops,” a former Contributor vendor. For the last four years, the two of them lived on the streets there. He shunned homeless encampments, and for the most part, shelter of any kind. And she promised she’d take care of him until the very end.

“He was so sick, I didn’t want to leave him by himself, sitting there. Nobody would help him. They’d just walk by and ignore him. I promised him that I wouldn’t leave him, I’d be there until the day he died. And I was. I couldn’t go off and do anything. I had to be right there if he wanted to go to the bathroom or get something to eat,” Dana says. “He couldn’t do it on his own. That’s what stopped me from getting a lot of things. ”

The pair had been together for 20 years, and she followed him as he tried to outrun paying child support. She supported them by cleaning hotels, at times when she was living outside herself. They’d lived in a lot of places, but Nashville was where she aspired to be, to “meet the stars.” Some of her favorites are Alan Jackson and Billy Ray Cyrus. Garth Brooks once walked by while she was living on the streets.

After Jon died in the winter of 2019, she went to her home state of Michigan to help a friend take care of her partner in the end stages of life. Then she came back to Nashville. She and Jon hadn’t sought out housing in years because he said he wanted to be on the streets, but now, she was ready. She worked with The Contributor’s housing navigators to make it a reality.

“I just told myself, ‘I’m going to do it. I’m going to get me a place.’ That was one of my goals. And I’ve done it,” Dana says.

The change couldn’t have come fast enough — she was in the hospital for dehydration and heat exhaustion just a few days prior to her move-in. The years on the streets had taken a toll on her kidneys, too. Now, she can lock her doors, away from the dangers of being a woman on the streets.

“It’s nice and quiet, I can turn everything off, close my blinds,” she says “I got my nightlight in there, leave that on. I can just lay down anytime I want and go to sleep. It’s the nicest feeling. I can take a shower whenever I want, not having to pay 14 dollars at the truck stop to take a shower. I’m enjoying this, believe me. I’m not getting any younger. I’ll be 69 next month.”

She’s back to singing along to gospel music at Robert’s Western World on Sundays, and hopes to get a keyboard to play, a double burner to cook, and eventually move into a larger apartment with a kitchen. She’s pondering going back to a Lutheran Church she used to attend, too. Plus, she’ll finish her border of art around the whole room. She’s taken to picking up the colored pencil instead of picking up a cigarette lately.

That evening, she’ll make dinner for a couple friends she met on the streets, who now live in the same complex. Dana still has it in her to care for others.