If you had told me ten years ago that I would spend my seventy-second year sleeping on a wire cot in a municipal shelter, clutching a handbag that contained the entirety of my worldly possessions, I would have poured you a fresh cup of coffee and laughed at the absurdity of it. I was Helen Harris. I had a home, a history, and a family. I believed in the unspoken contract of life: you work hard, you love deeply, and in return, your twilight years are spent in the warm glow of comfort and gratitude. But grief is a violent thing. It does not just take the people you love; it has a way of tearing down the structures that hold your life together, exposing the rot you never knew was there.
My life before the shelter was defined by two men: my husband, George, and our son, Mark. George and I had built our existence in a sprawling, creaky house filled with the scent of baking bread and the echoes of Mark’s childhood footsteps. When George passed away from cancer, the silence he left behind was deafening. I tried to endure the solitude, but the house felt like a museum of a life that no longer existed. So, when Mark asked me to move into the city to live with him, his wife Laura, and my grandchildren, I said yes.
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