Street roots., November 23, 2012, Page 9, Image 9

Street roots
9
Nov. 23, 2012
TED JACK, from page 8
In Ted’s own words, the “hallucinations
and headaches became intolerable after all
of the head injuries over the years. I just
wanted to die.”
Life continued to spin out of control for
the next two years. Coping any way he
could, mostly with the bottle, Ted was living
in doorways and under bridges in the
Emerald City.
In 2005, Ted tried selling Real Change,
the Seattle street newspaper, for the first
time. That s where I first met Ted. He tried
vending the paper on three occasions, but
the pain was simply too much and he
couldn’t control his binge drinking in order
to stay sober enough to be a vendor.
In March 2006, Ted attempted suicide
again by jumping off a bridge in Seattle.
Miraculously, he survived, and spent nearly
three weeks in the Harborview Medical
Center Psychiatric Unit. Upon his release
he was given two weeks worth of
psychotropic medications and tried selling
Real Change one more time. He remained
clean and sober for two and half weeks
before he relapsed and spent the rest of
2006 drinking and panhandling on the
streets of Seattle.
In January 2007, Ted came to Portland
and visited Street Roots. He told me at the
time he simply had no pface left to go and
didn’t really care if he lived or died, but that
he was willing to give Street Roots a try if
we would have him. He wanted badly to get
sober.
That same month, Ted went to Hooper
Detox Center and was discharged to Central
City Concern’s transitional housing and
treatment. He was assigned a case manager
and began a relationship with Old Town
Clinic. He was also taking his medications
again.
Like many people who have spent time
on the streets, Ted had no proof that he was
even a citizen of the United States. He had
no I.D. or Social Security Card. Unable to
cope with simply obtaining these basic
documents — even with mountains of
medical and police records — Ted left for
Seattle in March. He had hoped that in
Washington he could replace his Social
Security card and get re-established. Within
two weeks, and without medication, Ted was
picked up by the Seattle Police Department
for talking to himself on a street corner. He
was returned to Harborview Medical Center.
This time, after leaving the hospital,
something was different. According to
friends, he decided to turn himself in for
outstanding warrants and spent a month in
the King County jail. After his release from
jail, Ted found himself once again without
medication on the streets of Seattle. The
unstoppable voices returned and he
relapsed. He quickly found his way to
Portland and entered Hooper Detox one
more time. Shortly after, Ted returned to
the same transitional housing and on-site
case management services he had left
months before. Ted was now 36 years old
and had been homeless for 26 years of his
life.
In the late summer of 2007, Ted began to
sell Street Roots at a coffee shop near City
Hall in downtown Portland. Ted was going to
regular treatment groups, including Alcohol
Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous
meetings, and he received acupuncture
therapy through Central City Concern. Ted
also began to work with Mellani Calvin and
others at Central City Concern to try to
obtain Social Security disability assistance —
a long and complex process.
By 2008, those working with Ted at
Street Roots and Central City Concern
began to witness a slow transformation. He
was coming out of his shell, making friends
with a range of people, including Street
Roots readers and a woman, Heather, whom
he had met in recovery.
“We were two lost souls,” Heather says.
“We had been to hell and back. We were
right for each other.”
For the next four years, Heather and Ted
started a new life together.
He sold Street Roots a few hours a day,
went to meetings and began to go fishing
with a friend he met in AA. He went on
fishing trips on the Columbia River and
fished on the Eastbank Esplanade. Catching
a fair share of sturgeon and salmon, he
would text proud photos of his catches to
friends.
Ted also began to give back to the
community that he felt closest to.
Volunteering once a week at Street Roots
for a six-hour shift, Ted began to bring in
items other people on the streets needed to
survive.
“He did what he felt was right and
managed to show compassion to others no
matter how tough the situation seemed to
be,” says Becky Mullins, a former staff
member with Street Roots. “Ted would
donate things like socks, razors, shaving
cream, deodorant and many other items
vendors needed. Ted was always giving
himself back to the family who helped him
in his hardest times.”
Ted began to realize that giving back to
the community was something he was good
at and took pride in doing. He started
making stacks of bologna and cheese and
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches almost
every day to give to people he encountered
on the streets — his Street Roots readers,
people experiencing homelessness and
people he met through his recovery.
“Teddy had an incredible will to live and a
need to be kind to others when the world
had been so harsh to him,” says Calvin.
Ted did not have any formal education.
He learned to read, but could barely write
legibly. Many of his written characters were
reversed as if looking in a mirror, a strong
sign that Ted had dyslexia — something I
was also diagnosed with at age 9. His
disability did not stop him.
When Ted worked behind the desk at
Street Roots, we often joked that between
the two of us, no one was going to be able
to read a thing we wrote. The organization
and Ted created a method for understanding
how he documented each communication on
paper. We made it work.
For years, Ted had talked about his
dreams of going back to Alaska and to live
in the wilderness.
In late 2010, with the help of Central City
Concern, Ted received a large sum of back
pay and a monthly check for his disability.
In August of 2011, Ted and Heather
moved to Alaska. Ted purchased a plot of
land, an RV, and a dog in the harsh Alaskan
wild.
“He had a dream of owning his own mail
box,” says Heather. “He had never had a
mail box before. When he received his first
piece of mail, a neighbor told me his face
just lit up.”
In many ways, Ted traveled back to a
place that he imagined
as a youth — a vast
wilderness full of
lush forests and
rivers full of fish for
the catching.
In reality, he had
traveled to a plot of
land that had no
running water or
electricity in the
harsh Alaska terrain
to live out his last
days. Unfortunately,
his physical abilities
had been robbed of
him through a short
life of trauma.
On Nov. 7, Ted died
of health complications at the age of 41.
Although he lived a life most of us will never
know, he also lived a life that far too many
do know. For better or worse, Ted lived a
life out in the open.
“Ted was a wonderful man,” says
Heather. “He was a caring human being
who had a very hard life.”
Sometimes there is no explanation for
the storm that builds up inside a human
being. Regardless of how many lighthouses
remained lit for Ted and others over the
years, the storm sometimes is too strong
and consuming.
In the end, Ted died knowing that he was
loved and that he had loved, clean and
sober, with a clear mind. He was a good
man.
“He is sounding the deeps of his nature,
and of the parts of his nature that were deeper
than he, going back into the womb of time. ”
— Jack London, “Call of the Wild”
Author’s note: This was a very difficult piece
to write. Ted was my friend. Even now, I ’m
not sure if this is how he would like to be
remembered. B ut I believe Ted embodies the
life of many people on the streets, and his
story, no matter how tragic, should be told.
2 1 1 in fo
Ted pulling a
sturgeon out of the
Willamette River.
There will be a
brief memorial
service for Ted on
Tuesday, Dec. 4,
at 6 p.m. at the
Downtown Chapel,
601 West Burnside
St. For more
information,
contact israel@
streetroots.org
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