What’s it like to be a cup of coffee?

Twenty-some years ago I was the director of a homeless outreach team in New Haven. I also studied the work, in part by interviewing people who were homeless. Kidd, a young man who didn’t think much of outreach workers or the services we offered, told me I didn’t know a thing about what it was like to be homeless.

“What’s it like to be homeless?” I asked.

“What’s it like to be a cup of coffee?” he answered.

He did have the beginning of a solution for our ignorance:

“I’d like to get a few of you people together to go out and spend about six nights homeless. Put the billfold away, put the car away, and come out and see what it’s like. You go to the overflow shelter some night, you will never want to go there again. It will leave a taste in your mouth you’ll never forget. Like eating anchovies. And I don’t mean one anchovy, I mean a whole tin of anchovies with no water afterwards.” 1

But this kind of direct experience won’t work for supporting a friend over a loved one’s death.You can’t go there, and what grieving person would want you to?

Many people don’t know what to say to a friend, colleague, or neighbor who is grieving. ‘You never get over something like that,’ Dr. Spiro said to me in our first meeting (blog post #8), but that requires a certain amount of hutzpah, along with some insight into the person you’re talking to. “How are you doing?” might work, depending on your relationship with the person and how you ask it.

Or it might not. Drawing on my outreach work experience again, the question might elicit the response I got from a person who was homeless in the basement soup kitchen of a church on a cold winter morning in New Haven in 1994.

“How are you doing?” I asked him.

“You asked the question, you already know the answer,” he said.

A word or card that comes later than, say, two weeks after a loved one’s death can be meaningful, especially if it includes mention of that loved one. I was struck, after my son’s death, by sympathy directed toward me without mention of Jesse, as though being gone there was nothing more to be said about him. Perhaps the speakers feared that speaking his name might upset me. Hardly, since I was thinking about him all the time.

Beyond individual grief, David McIvor, in his book Mourning in America, writes about public mourning linked with advocacy movements such as Black Lives Matter. He reaches as far back as ancient Greek Tragedy to identify possible forms for acting out and eliciting public grief, awareness, and action. 2 Are there comparable possibilities for individual grief recognized collectively? I don’t know, but I do know one thing that happens at events associated with racial justice movements.

The dead are named.

George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breanna Taylor . . .

1. Rowe M. Crossing the border: Encounters between homeless people and outreach workers. (1999). Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1999, 84.

2. McIvor D. Mourning in America: Race and the politics of loss. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016.