An interview with “Joe”: tragedy and homelessness (Part 2)
By Jacob Vorpahl
His current life
Today, Joe finds himself on the streets of Jacksonville, continually haunted by the memories of that day, unable to move past them. “Right now it could be the windiest night out… if I hadn’t had too much to drink… I could still smell that smoke. I could still smell that burning. I could still smell pine wood from that truck. I could still smell the car burning. I could still see that guy coming out that car, holding’ on to me while she’s screaming.” He pauses for a moment in reflection, and then goes on. “I could still see it, right now, today.”
Sometimes he has to walk at night because he’s afraid to go to sleep. “My feet hurt me so bad sometimes, just…. keep walking, keep walking, keep walking, keep walking.”
He’s tried in some minor ways to get help. He’s made appointments with the VA to talk to someone, but he backs down from them. He says there is always going to be someone who tells you they understand but doesn’t. It makes him upset and he takes it personally. He feels that when they say they understand but don’t, it’s like saying his child is like every other child, and she wasn’t.
Joe says he understands that God does everything for a reason, but from the way he talks he still seems conflicted in his relationship with God. “This is spiritual. There’s no psychiatrist that can help me. I’m still trying to build my trust in the Lord. I know he’s there. But I still can’t understand. That’s why my life is running this way.”
People have told him it’s PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). He says, “if that is what this is, there’s a lot of mothers and fathers and families who’ve lost children in combat that’s needing some help.” He says he doesn’t know how to handle the situation and the streets are his way of dealing with it.
“I can’t sleep in shelters. In can’t do that. I can’t do shelters.” So Joe stays on the streets. He sometimes uses the VA drop in center in the mornings at a local mission to take a shower. He has a little “cat hole” where he sleeps, when he can, unless people start coming around, then he finds some place else. “I’m just existing, trying to stay out of the way, to be honest. … I don’t want to trouble anybody… I wouldn’t come get those bag lunches if I didn’t absolutely need it.”
Daze
One theme that kept coming up as I talked with Joe was a recurring problem with going into a daze. He asked me, “Do you know what it feels like to not even sleep for six and seven days and nights? Just walked ‘til the shoes tore out, your feet are so stinkin’, you body’s so stinkin’, you… I didn’t even know! I’m not even conscious of it.”
This daze overtook him so powerfully at that point that he walked from Jacksonville, FL to an area near Ft. Stewart, GA. That’s a distance of around 120 miles one way. The only way he knew when the walk started was because he had a copy of the Florida Times Union in his back pocket and he checked the date.
This hasn’t helped with work either. It turns out that the construction job he’d received a while back fell victim to it. Joe was doing well with his work until he fell back into a daze. He said he just started thinking about things. People would have to call to him to snap him out of it and tell him what to do. He says people can’t work a job like that. Then they would start to ask questions and he doesn’t want people bothering with it so he leaves. He starts running.
Joe says it’s still like a nightmare. He’s at the point to get a job, get back into society, and “there my head goes again.” He would love nothing more than to be “stable enough to go under someone’s employment and be a top employee and do a real good job for as long as it takes.” He tries to do that but has lost jobs because of what goes on in his head. Even with his past Army career and two years of college, he remains jobless because of his mental anguish.
Guilt
I’m not a psychiatrist, but as I was talking with Joe I could sense that there was some guilt in his demeanor over what happened with his daughter. I asked him if he thought that what happened was his fault. He said no, but then he kept talking about the accident and revealed what I think are his true feelings.
“It’s not what I did, it’s what I could have done,” Joe said to me. He says he should have come up with the adrenaline to get the state trooper off of him so he could get his baby. He says he’s not sure if he came out of the car the right way. Then, in an emotionally flustered, but low key voice, he says he’s thought that maybe briefly it went through his mind as to which of the girls he didn’t want to save, as if he chose one over the other to die. “But the seat belt was jammed… I could have… should have done something.” “I wish it could have been me instead of her.”
Family and Phobia
Joe still has family that is looking for him and at one point they found him. This past summer he was walking downtown away from one of the local missions and two vans came to a screeching halt in the intersection next to him. Out from the vehicles pour his brothers and aunts, while his mother sat in the passenger seat of one of the vans and burst into tears. They were heading down to Miami from North Carolina for a funeral and by chance they happened to spot him. He knew they were trying to get a hold of him, but he didn’t want to see them. He said he’s carrying a little bit of shame.
His family begged and pleaded with him to come with them, but he lied and told them he was at work and was on his lunch break. He told them he would come down for the funeral after he got off. Joe said that lying to his mother hurt him very badly, but he “just couldn’t be around family.”
“I can’t. I can’t. ‘Cause pretty soon my mother’s going to leave me. I know this… I lost my baby sister… just as soon as we started getting tight, she died of cancer. I never knew she had cancer. It makes you scared to get close to your people…”
And therein he reveals another problem he’s struggling with: a fear of losing those he loves. “Something inside of you, and I know it’s probably just Satan… you feel like everything you get close to is going to leave you. So you try and avoid getting close to ‘em.”
He says it’s hard for him to get personal with a female again. “Anything I grasp… I have a phobia… that it’s going to be taken away from me.” So he says, “I’ve tried to back up from society a bit.”
Moving forward
Joe has a daughter right now somewhere in Jacksonville. He visually saw her once when she was paying some people to find him. She left contact information with them and it eventually made its way to Joe. Unfortunately, he lost it. I asked him if he would even want to see her, and he said no. He said he’s not ready for that.
And that is unfortunately where Joe finds himself. He struggles to deal with the pain that it seems he feels responsible for and he backs away from family who wants to help him heal. He’ll go back to trying to get things to work again and not think about the past, and he may go farther this time than last. “God knows I’m back trying again.” All we can do is pray that he reconciles himself with God and begins to heal from the hurt. The pain is something that Joe will have to face and conquer one day if he is ever to live a normal life again.
