12.22.2021-digital

Annual memorial honors lives of those who spent time on the streets

BY HANNAH HERNER

On Dec. 18, homeless service providers, government officials and friends gathered at Riverfront Park to honor the 194 people in the homeless community that died this year. Some were in housing by the time they passed, and others weren’t. The number is up from 128 last year, and hovered around 100 in the years prior. Lindsey Krinks, co-founder of Open Table Nashville, which puts on the event, says “part of that is because our reporting is getting better and part of that is because things are getting worse on the streets.” The average age of death was just 53 years old, and the oldest person to die on the streets this year was 73, still four years younger than the average life expectancy in the United States. Forty-one of them had sold papers for The Contributor at one point or another. Bobby Watts, executive director of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, which is headquartered in Nashville, shared that ceremonies around Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day originated in Nashville in 1986, before it became a national ob-servance in 1990. “There are 194 that we know about. The question is how many people died experiencing homelessness that we don’t know about? One thing we do know is that many of them died too early many of them died in conditions that could and should be prevented,” he said. He added, “What it takes is all of us making sure we’re caring for people one-to-one as individuals and that we make sure that our society’s systems are working for all of us. Because it’s not re- ally working for any of us. If we have people dying on the streets, we’re not a healthy country, we are not a healthy city. If we have people who are dying prematurely because they don’t have health care, we are falling fall short of our potential and our responsibility. Nashville, we can do better. Nashville, we must do better. We must hold those accountable and help those in power, who have the purse strings, who can change laws, who change systems — we have to make them do it. That’s our responsibility.”

These 194 names were each read aloud. Each name was also written on a small white flag, carried by the group up to Public Square Park and stuck in the ground. A jar of slips of paper with notes to the deceased was gathered, to be buried at the Hills of Calvary indigent burial site. One hundred and ninety four names, 194 little white flags, and 194 people lost, each with some time taken away due to experiencing homelessness. The hope is for housing to give some of that time back.