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 briey. 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.
