It was so brutally freezing that morning. I tried to cover every inch of my skin with glove or scarf or hood. I couldn’t get my eyes – it was too overcast to justify shades and it’s not like they’d have protected me from the elements anyway. As I walked to the train, my eyes began to tear up from the bitter cold of the scathing winter wind. I had to wipe away the teardrops so that people didn’t think I was crying. I mean, what kind of man cries, right?
Later, just after leaving the train, I had to wipe my eyes because I was indeed crying a little. I saw a dead man. Not a ghost. This man was dead, but yet he was still alive. Not a zombie either. He was a real live human. Barely.
He was dead because he seemed to show no sign of having anything that you or I would consider a “life”. He was only alive because his heart happened to continue beating. I only know he lived because he shuffled a bit at the screeching of the subway train as it pulled away.
He was so close to being a dead man that he slept in what amounted to a body-bag. Wrapped in a blanket and some foam and a garbage bag, he succeeded where I had failed: he had covered every last inch of his body from the cold…including his eyes. Even underground in the subway station, it was frigid. Even underground with the rats, there was somehow still a slight wind. The rats scurried along the tracks, but he just sat there. The rats were more alive than he was.
Here he was, grasping on to whatever life he had left when it would be so much easier to just crawl above ground and expose himself to the frost of evening where he could be carried off to the next realm with hopes that he might find a better sort of existence. Just above this station is the Trinity Church Cemetery where he could go and lie down to die among the graves of notable corpses like Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Robert Fulton. But here he chose to stay and fight, buried alive in his tomb, wrapped tight in his body-bag, keeping safe from the cold…and the rats.
It’s not quite true when I said that it was only his slight movement confirming to me that he was still alive. And it’s not when I saw this man in his body-bag that my eyes began to well up. It’s when I heard him that I knew he was alive. It’s when I heard him that I knew his heart was still beating. It’s when I heard him that my heart broke. Because after the train and its screeching wheels had been long gone, and the crowd of commuters dissipated, all that was left was the sound of scurrying rats and the deep, thick sobbing of a dead man alive.
If you would like to learn more about the severity of New York City’s homeless issue, please visit: The Coalition for the Homeless. You’ll find a number of ways you can help in addition to working with various local homeless programs.
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