A Tribute for Darius

I first met Darius several years ago, on a rainy December evening, outside his tent under the 405 overpass. We were handing out Christmas gifts, and he said he would remember me, because I was like Mother Teresa. He had been drinking, and between the noise of the cars overhead, the falling rain, and his slurred speech, it was hard to understand him. But that night he entered my heart and my prayers.

Some weeks later, I saw him again, a few blocks away, on 18th . He remembered me. And from then on, when we went out with soup on Thursday evenings, I tried to connect with him, until one spring evening, sitting on the sidewalk outside his tent, he told me his story, a story so full of suffering that I cried as we spoke.

I won’t retell it all here, because it is still his story, but these details will suffice to show something of the depths of his suffering. When he was five years old, his parents gave him marijuana for the first time, because they thought it would be funny to see him high—a detail he recounted with great sorrow more than once. He suffered every kind of abuse within his own family. By the time he was a teenager, he was using hard drugs to numb the pain, and off and on was a ward of the state. In the 70s, he went to college to study psychology, not because he had ambitions to do something with a degree, but just to understand why his family was so messed up. He never knew love—just violence and use—except for one woman, in his 40s or 50s, with whom he had a son.

When his son was first born, Darius was afraid to touch him, afraid that he would automatically hurt his child, as he had been hurt in his childhood. But then he came to love his boy very much—so much that, when his son was (I think) around 10, he decided that it would be best for him not to see his son very much, not wanting to be a bad influence, since he was homeless and addicted to heroin. Some time after that, his son died unexpectedly, and Darius, weeping, told me he could not forgive himself for having made that decision.

That event was followed by multiple suicide attempts. “I don’t know why I had to wake up every time,” he told me. The drinking was to help stop the pain, because the heroin didn’t take it away, the pain of all the suffering of his past, the pain of his dead son, the pain of not being able to end it all. But one day he decided to stop drinking, tired of how undignified it made him act.

I tried to share the Gospel with him that night, but he couldn’t believe. How could God allow so much suffering? Yet he let me put my hands on him and pray for him, and cried as I prayed. That was the night we became, in a real way, friends.

For the next few years, I looked for him every time we brought soup out, and even during the summer, when we weren’t going as a group, I would go to visit him. Much of the time, we didn’t have a lot to say—he might tell me of the ways all his things kept being stolen, or go back to a story of his childhood.

Sometimes we would just sit together, and I would rest my hand on his arm or shoulder, silently praying for him. When there were long gaps between visits, he would hug me, burying his face in my shoulder and crying. When I stood with my arms crossed, trying to stay warm, he would scold me for my closed off body posture—still using the knowledge he had gained in studying psychology.

One time, during the summer, I couldn’t find him when I came to visit at a time I had promised, so I went back out to look for him the following week. He wasn’t expecting me, and it took him a bit to get out of his tent, from which the sounds of an opera aria floated out onto the summer evening air. As we talked, I realized, from the bleeding spot on his arm, that he had just begun to shoot up, but had given up the hit for me, pulling the needle out when he heard my voice.

Last spring, one of our novices came with me to visit Darius, and after we had spoken with him, she felt moved to give him the crucifix she carried in her pocket. I said, “He doesn’t even believe in God,” but Emilia felt moved to give it to him, and he accepted it.

Despite many moves and sweeps, despite having most of his things stolen over and over in the subsequent months, Darius kept Emilia’s crucifix, and each time I visited, he would tell me he still had it. The last time I saw him, one month ago, he told me it had been taken from him about a week before, and he asked me for a replacement.

Last week, I went looking for Darius near where I thought his tent was, under the 405 overpass where we had first met several years ago. He wasn’t there, and Dori came out of her tent, teary-eyed, and told me that Darius had died early that morning of a fentanyl overdose. I spent the rest of that evening, as we went tent to tent with soup, holding back tears.

Homeless or housed, it hurts to lose a friend. It’s strange to think of going out for the next soup night, knowing that he won’t be there—it’s like a hole in the canvas of a painting, an important figure cut out. As I write this, tears fall, just as they fall when I pray for him.

I pray for Darius looking at the crucifix, where Jesus takes on Himself all of our sins, all of our brokenness, and I see Him taking on all of Darius’s broken childhood, all the pain of the death of his son, all his abandonment, all his addiction, and I pray that, even though someone stole Emilia’s crucifix from him, Darius let the love of God, manifested through the cross of Christ, enter into his heart. I entrust my friend Darius to the infinite mercy of God and hope to see him again one day, risen with Christ, finally free from suffering and pain, embraced by those arms that once stretched out on the cross for his redemption.

Sister Teresa