There are things you never know about someone until they die. Even then, they take chunks of their memories to the grave. But glimmers of stories come out at funerals, not so much in the polished eulogy, but more when people start talking and the tales ooze out in dribs and drabs.
Such was the case with Roxy.
I’d met Roxy at least a decade before she passed. She was already a regular at our food pantry when I became the manager. She’d started volunteering at the pantry’s former site and then when my predecessor, John Elizalde, moved the Northeast Emergency Food Program (NEFP) to the basement of Luther Memorial Church, Roxy came along as part of the deal.
She came in on Tuesdays and Saturdays, sitting on her walker behind a desk arranged just for her in the reception area. Roxy didn’t have a spelled-out job description. As the needs of the pantry changed over time, so did her few responsibilities. Basically, she was there to greet people, or rather bark at them if they got out of line. And when we started using a number system to determine which client went next, well, she handed out the numbers. And got into arguments with those who thought they deserved a better number.
Roxy was the queen of the food pantry. She’d dress up for special days, like holidays and her birthday. She loved hats. For her wedding anniversary, she’d wear her gown. Roxy had been married briefly years before. I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but some elderly man had taken kindly to her in spite of her disability – he married her and then died. About the only thing he left her was his family name. Dollar. So Roxy Dollar she became.
Roxy was loud and Roxy was bossy. But she had a huge smile and was fiercely loyal to the pantry staff. She’d arrive on the public transit for people with disabilities. Her job done, she’d shuffle out early to wait in the parking lot for her ride to return home, pushing her walker onto the bus’s lowered platform and riding it up.
Over time, the church that housed NEFP became her home church, and she rode that same bus to Sunday morning services. The folks at Luther Memorial welcomed her as one of their own.
Back in the late 1940s, Luther Memorial had started as a country church. Gradually Portland swallowed up the Cully neighborhood, annexing it and taking its taxes, but doing little to improve its streets. Whatever Cully’s past, it had become a struggling neighborhood long before I met it. As late as the Great Recession of 2008, it still had the biggest concentration of unpaved streets in the city. Heavy rains flooded the streets which poured into the church yard, turning the pantry’s entry area into a lake.
The church had grown considerably until the pastor had an affair with some woman in the congregation and the church splintered like soft wood in a chopper. Then Pastor Greg came to shepherd the remnant and the congregation bravely soldiered on a couple more decades, congregants and building aging and dwindling with the passing years. By the time Pastor Carol replaced the retiring Pastor Greg, the congregants numbered 30 mostly elderly souls.
The only person of color, Roxy, in her 70s, fit right in on Sunday mornings. She’d sit on her walker down front on the right side. Whenever the Lutheran hymns got lively enough, she’d play her tambourine and get up and dance.
At a church anniversary service, a couple of the men in the congregation were helping Roxy settle in. Something wasn’t working for her, delaying the start of the meeting. In a crowd so small, you wait till everyone is ready. I heard Lou on the far side shout out, “Take your time, Roxy. We’ve all been there.”
Roxy wasn’t the only congregant who volunteered in the food pantry, but she was the only one I know of who had started coming to the church because it was upstairs from the pantry. Several church members were regulars downstairs. Darlene and Kathleen volunteered in the clothing room. Ken distributed food at the Head Start school around the block. And Norm escorted clients getting their groceries in the shopping-style pantry right up till the day he died.
Norm always came on Thursdays. That fateful Thursday, he headed home to the house nearby where he and Darlene had lived for years. As he started up the steps, he keeled over and never made it in the front door.
Norm was always concerned about having fresh bananas for the clients. A couple days after he passed, a semi hauling a trailer pulled up in front of the church and the driver asked if we could use any bananas. His load turned out to be a duplicate delivery at the Safeway a few blocks over. He needed to get rid of the whole trailer of bananas pronto. Travis, NEFP’s assistant manager, took all the green bananas we could use. Word got out to the neighborhood and the entire trailer was emptied in short order. Everyone said it was Norm’s farewell gift to the pantry.
Roxy, Darlene, Kathleen, Ken, and other church members kept volunteering until the COVID pandemic hit, and then they stopped going out anywhere. The kinds of volunteer jobs Roxy and the rest had been doing at NEFP disappeared overnight.
In response to the massive surge in need, our team emptied the used clothing room and moved the food distribution into the church parking lot, turning the 9,000 square feet of the church’s basement and upstairs fellowship hall into sorting warehouses. Clients drove up in cars, as masked volunteers with face shields and gloves swiftly filled their trunks with abundant supplies of groceries, all without any direct contact.
In no time, the car line was snaking through the Cully neighborhood for blocks on end three days a week. We went from serving a few hundred families a month to serving more than 50,000 people each and every month throughout the pandemic.
One day after the pandemic had subsided, I got a call. Roxy had died and a memorial service was scheduled. I hoped some folks would show up. I had nothing to fear – church members, pantry staff and volunteers past and present, friends from all around crowded the service. Pastor Carol shared words of comfort from the Scriptures. Then the dribs and drabs started.
Mary, who had been Roxy’s caregiver for many years, was the last to share. In her job with the county, Mary was a caregiver for several adults with disabilities. She made sure the needs of all of them were taken care of. But she had a special place in her heart for Roxy. Mary, strong and tough, worked hard to fight back the tears as she shared some of those dribs and drabs of Roxy’s story.
A year ago, Kim and I moved to Salem, Oregon’s state capital, an hour south of Portland. I kept hearing rumors about an old state facility once located in now overgrown fields near our new home. Taking a hike on a path through those fields one day, dribs of Roxy’s story came to mind.
The Fairview Training Center, a state-run facility, had been established more than a century ago as the “State Institute for the Feeble-Minded”. Back then, people with disabilities of all sorts were institutionalized, often without choice.
In the early 1920s, forced sterilization of many of the facility’s patients was carried out by the state’s Board of Eugenics. I don’t know if that was still going on when Roxy entered the facility as a child but reports about Fairview, well into Roxy’s time there, are the stuff of scary legend.
Though she lived at Fairview until she was in her 30s, she never talked much about it. When she did, she expressed only horror at the triggering of those long-suppressed memories. It was a wretched place. She was freed from the institution long before it finally closed in 2000. When she heard the news that one of the remaining buildings was gutted by fire of a suspicious nature in 2010, she danced and sang around our pantry reception area.
At Fairview, they had told Roxy she was incapable of learning how to read or write. One of her joys later in life was learning how to print and spell simple words and read at a basic level. They’d said she could never survive on her own outside of institutionalized living, but Mary showed her how she could.
Today the former institution’s hundreds of acres are being turned into much needed housing. A few of the old buildings remain, incongruously juxtaposed among fancy homes selling for $750k a pop, affordable housing units, and brambled fields.
I think of Roxy whenever I walk through those new neighborhoods and on the trails through those fields. The process of deinstitutionalizing people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities occurred over several decades starting in the 1950s. Especially in the ‘80s, a lot of people wound up dumped on the streets, often without support services.
When Roxy was released in that dumping era, she went through years of instability. Although thrilled to be out of that institutional nightmare, she still faced traumatizing insecurity as she struggled to navigate life on her own without supportive caregivers.
Then Mary came along and helped Roxy find decent housing, all covered by taxpayer funding, but still a bargain deal from institutionalization costs. Mary also helped Roxy with shopping, meal service, medical care, and other assistance. Roxy’s needs were finally being met in a manner affirming her dignity as a human being made in God’s image.
Eventually Roxy found community at the pantry and at the church. Neither NEFP nor Luther Memorial could have afforded to meet even a fraction of her material and social service needs, but they met her social and spiritual needs nowhere else could provide.
There were times in the past decade when outsiders wondered why Luther Memorial kept going. With shrinking numbers, aging members, and decaying facility, they called it a dying church. I kept telling the church members that any place serving tens of thousands of people in need every month, faithfully preaching the Word, and providing spiritual family for community orphans like Roxy was not a dying church.
While I lived in Portland, I attended funerals of some of the church’s faithful members. Well after dementia had stolen Lucille’s memories, she was still the love of Ken’s life till the last. Married more than 60 years, they had wed and bought a house a couple of blocks over from the church straight out of high school. I was also there for Norm’s funeral. And for Andy’s, the electrician by trade who kept fixing up the church and pantry into his 90s.
Occasionally I preached on Sundays when Pastor Carol took much needed breaks. I loved speaking to that congregation. I knew them all by name and had worked many hours alongside them as they served their neighbors so desperately in need of hope.
When I preached, Roxy would always be seated on her walker at the front. Looking down from the platform, I would think about how much Roxy and that church needed each other. These aging believers were desperate to serve their community, so well aware of how our society doesn’t always know what to do with people as they age. Our society doesn’t always know what to do with people like Roxy either. Institutions like Fairview and the dumping of people out of those institutions had proven that.
If Luther Memorial had closed, where would she have gone? Portland had bigger churches, but only Luther Memorial was home for Roxy.
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