Author: Joshua L. Weinstein

A homeless man died alone on a hot sidewalk outside my gym on Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Police Department put a little plastic tent around the body, I guess to provide some degree of dignity to the body of a man who was denied it in life. A lone officer stood nearby, waiting for someone from the coroner’s office.

As the officer waited, a guy I sort of know showed up at the gym. He saw the cop on his way in, and he made a joke:

“They’re looking for you,” he said.

“Somebody died,” I told him.

It took a moment for my answer to register. I stepped outside to go home. I paused for a moment, trying to think of a prayer or a word or something appropriate to do, when my acquaintance emerged.

“What was he, a bum?” the guy asked me.

I told him no, the dead man was a person.

“Yeah, but a bum,” my acquaintance said.

I glanced toward the body and then at my acquaintance.

“No,” I answered. “He was a child of God and he died this afternoon, alone on a hot sidewalk, with no one to grieve.”

My acquaintance blinked a few times and went back inside. The temperature on the sidewalk had cooled to the mid-90s, and the man had been dead a few hours. No use staying outside.

Dozens, maybe hundreds of homeless people live in the alleys and sidewalks of that neighborhood, an easy walk from stores that sell shoes for more than $2,000 a pair. Those shoes are so far outside my realm of experience I don’t even look at them.

I pay the homeless people who inhabit those streets about the same attention.

Yet on this sticky Tuesday afternoon, I was touched by the death of a man I doubt I’d ever met and doubt I would have paid attention to.

He and I breathed the same air, lived in the same city. Our shoes padded down the same sidewalks.

Someone probably loved him once, even if brie􀂁y. He once was an infant, with the promise of new life. I imagine enjoyed the same things most people do: A slice of cake, a cold drink, a hot shower. I wondered when he last enjoyed any of those. I wondered about his final hours, and whether he even had the comfort of a breeze.

I am ashamed that I didn’t give him the consideration in life that I gave him in death.

A FRIEND IN MY BELOVED MAINE REMINDS ME that I once told him it was unfortunate that he believes people are innately good.

It sounds like something I would have said.

I was wrong.

Not that I think all people are good, because some are rotten. I have witnessed acts of kindness that are as tiny as they are sublime, and petty cruelties that manage to be mammoth. Philosophers – people far smarter than I – are still chewing over the state of humankind.

Whether people are innately good or bad doesn’t really matter, though. Whether we are prisoners, princes, or paupers, we all have intrinsic worth, and we deserve dignity.

Here’s where I was wrong: I told my friend it was unfortunate that he believes people are innately good. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If he believes people are good, he sees them as good. He sees their value, their beauty, their humanity.

When we acknowledge the humanity in others, we connect with them, if only a little. When we do that, we make our own lives better and we make the world a little kinder. Maybe, in fact, by seeing people as good, we help them become good. And if we don’t, well, a sunny outlook sure is better than a sour one.

A HOMELESS MAN DIED ALONE, sweating on a hot sidewalk, in one of the most glamorous cities in the world on Tuesday.

I don’t know about the afterlife or about God, but if there is either, I hope the man who died alone on a hot summer afternoon is welcomed by a chorus of angels.

I hope those same angels crush my callousness and awaken my own better angels – and all of ours.

Just before 7 a.m. on this day one year ago, I awoke in a guest room in my parents’ house. I padded up the long hallway to a little set of stairs and took a few steps. My mother and father slept a few feet to my right, but I turned left to another room, to greet the Angel of Death.

“Good morning,” she said.

Her French Caribbean accent made the words sound like burnt sugar, and her smile was kind.

But she lied. It was a very bad morning.

My father was dying. Cancer had spread to both lungs and his liver. He had pneumonia. His kidney – cancer had invaded the other, and a physician who was more technician than healer had removed it 13 months earlier – was failing.

Now, a hospice nurse with a soothing accent, a gentle manner, and a bottle of morphine tended to him.

We had tucked a hospital bed into the corner of his bedroom, and he had slept through the night. My father was too weak even to turn, and the nurse asked me for help turning him on his side.

Nearby, my mother slumbered alone in the bed she and my father had shared for decades. I worried that moving my dad would wake her. Reality was ugly, and I wanted her to have the comfort of sleep.

The nurse agreed. She went to check my father’s blood pressure.

She came back and said this: “Your father has no blood pressure.”

“Does that mean he’s gone?” I asked.

A simple nod would have sufficed, or a yes. Instead, she said it again.

“He has no blood pressure.”

I knew he was dying, but it took a moment for me to understand what she meant. And then the tumult. Telling my mom. Telling my older brother, who also had spent the night in the house. Calling my sister and my younger brother.

I stepped away from the chaos, to the quiet of the family room. It’s usually a boisterous place, but for a few moments that sad morning, it was just me. I sat down and hyperventilated.

I remember being surprised at my reaction – hyperventilation. I figured maybe I’d cry or something, but that didn’t come until later.

For now, I’d gulp air.

Today is a year. My family and I have gone through the things people go through in a year: Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. They have been less joyous, and sometimes unspeakably sad.

The all-encompassing grief that washed over me in the days after my dad died is unsustainable, and has subsided a little. I’m even happy sometimes. Then I feel guilty for feeling happy, and then I feel silly for feeling guilty for feeling happy. And sometimes I’ll see something, or hear something or smell something or think something, and a wave of sadness will hit me. I go all weak in the knees – my legs literally lose their strength – and my eyes flood. And then I smile.

I’m used to it. Not over it.

Alvin N. Weinstein was 87. He had a good life. He managed to be both urbane and silly. He spoke four languages, he was a brilliant lawyer, he was a virtuoso musician.

People tell me he lived a long life.

I agree.

But it wasn’t long enough.