marichiko

I can speak to this one. I have "lost" my name in the sense that I have lost almost everything that I once used to define myself: I am a professional, a librarian and a college teacher. I love books and knowledge and I write bad poetry in my spare time. I am married to a writer and we own a three bedroom home in a nice part of a small college town in western Colorado. I make a comfortable middle class income and I save for my retirement and I have health and disability insurance. I am doing well in my career and hope to one day achieve the position of either being in charge of my own library or becoming the collection development officer for the sciences in a major university library. My father loves me and is proud of me, and I have made peace with my mother by moving 300 miles away from her.

That was then. Fast forward to one year ago today. I was homeless, living on the banks of the San Miguel River. My marriage had ended in divorce and my father had passed on. My senile Mother had been manipulated by her second husband into throwing me out on the street. The material things I had accumulated over a life time were all stolen or destroyed or hauled off to the local land fill. Every scrap of writing I had labored so hard on was destroyed. I had run through all my savings and resources long before. I could no longer hold down even the most menial job. The one thing that I had counted on to carry me through any situation - my intelligence - had been impacted by a long, slow but steady exposure to a deadly poison- carbon monoxide. I suffered from short term memory loss that impacted my ability to problem solve and carry out to completion even the simplest of tasks. I experienced odd blank outs of my current experiences. I could no longer trust my own perceptions or my ability to asess people or situations. The result was that I trusted no one else either.

I was a non person living in a tent with only my cat for company. I was 20 miles from the nearest town and didn't have gas money, and besides, my car was illegal to drive since I had no money for insurance or valid plates. There was no one to call me by my name, and that person with that name didn't exist anymore, anyhow.

I think that there on the San Miguel River I was stripped down to my most basic essence. What was left to me were my words because that part of my brain had remained pretty intact, and my spirit. I picked wild flowers and arranged them in empty soup cans and jars and put them all around my camp. I decorated the sides of my tent with sketches printed on cards that somone had given me. I bathed every day in the icey mountain waters of the San Miguel and washed my clothes in the river as well and I would put on clean clothes and make up every day because I had to look good for a very important person - myself.

I figured that the only way I could be beaten was if I stopped fighting, so when I had gas money I drove to Telluride and went to the public library and wrote letters to everyone I could think of - the state and national congress, social security, the various newspapers, and the Colorado Cross Disability Association. In my heart I carried the thought of 6,000 people living in Colorado who were going through the same sort of plight that I was - the needy disabled people of this state who must wait two years or more before getting help from the federal government. Colorado in its vast wisdom and genorosity gives its disabled $170.00 a month plus $140.00 in food stamps - nothing more, and there is NO other help out there. I wrote my letters on the behalf of those 6,000 as well as my own.

Who am I without my name? I am a fighter. I care deeply about what happens to other people, not just myself, and I look for beauty in whatever might be around me - in the wildflowers in a mountain meadow, in the face of a little girl on a city street, and in the sweet, tired eyes of the exhausted mother sitting next to me in a social services office.

Who am I without my name? I am a flawed human being, more than some and less than others, but I still have a deep intrinsic value as a person in my own right, just as we all do.