My father battled homelessness and addiction. His letters give me hope for Pierce County

Stashed in a box in my office, I have stored 27 years’ worth of letters from my father. Having spent the better part of his life battling addiction and mental illness, he was often absent from my life, save for these letters. They are a chronicle of his struggles and his triumphs, his dreams and his regrets, and still — nearly five years after his death — I take them out from time to time whenever I need to reflect on certain hard truths about life and love and God and mercy.

My father may have been a homeless addict for a good portion of his life, but he had access to a kind of wisdom that still seems to elude me, despite my education and so-called worldliness.

In reading his letters as a complete text, I can see the narrative arc take shape. I can see when he is at his most vulnerable, when he is using, when he is whole. The letters resemble a wave: expansive when he is connected to a community, withdrawn when he is languishing on his own.

For many years, my father lived in the Washington City Mission in Washington, Pennsylvania, a Christian halfway house that required strict sobriety, church attendance and concrete responsibilities to the community for admittance. As restrictive as that kind of life might seem, those were the expansive times.

His letters from the Mission were often ten pages long, always hand-written on yellow legal paper, covering a week’s worth of events at a time. They were optimistic, thoughtful and almost scholarly in scope. It’s clear that he spent long hours in reflection and even longer hours in communion with the word of God and the other men at the Mission.

“My spiritual life seems to get better each time I come around here,” he once wrote.

It is clear to me, in retrospect, that community was the only thing that ever kept my father alive.

I think about my father’s experience every time I drive by a homeless encampment in Tacoma. I can’t help but wonder what kind of untapped potential, what kind of hard-earned wisdom resides in each tent. I also can’t help but wonder if the power of community could be as transformative for those people as it was for my father. That “tent cities” exist at all speaks to the fundamental human need to live in communion with one another.

I’m optimistic about Pierce County’s consideration of the Community First! model to address our burgeoning homelessness problem. Similar to an Austin, Texas program, it could build a micro-home community that would house between 200 and 300 chronically homeless residents. A year ago, I was also heartened to see the First Christian Church of Tacoma open a micro-shelter site on its grounds, and I wondered if we couldn’t go a step further in this effort and enlist the support of local technical colleges to provide skills training for potential residents so that they could have a stake in building their own homes while learning marketable trades in the process.

If we begin to view the homelessness problem not as one of the moral failings of the unhoused but as one of an absence of community and purpose, I am confident that we can begin to make progress. My father never failed to mention his desire to be of use to the world, a desire that is squarely at odds with the narrative we have spun around homelessness.

“I know that I’m supposed to serve,” he wrote as he contemplated a career in drug and alcohol counseling. “I am confident that at some point I will know the direction to take.”

As an established community, we already know the direction we need to take. If we can begin to help our unhoused neighbors — and ourselves for that matter — find their direction, find a way to be of service to one another and to the broader world, I know that we will begin to find solutions to this problem. Community First! Would be an important first step.

Joanna Manning lives in Tacoma. Find more of her work at www.jlmanning.com.