I (38F) work twelve-hour shifts at St. Catherine’s and I do not have a lot left in the tank by the time I get home. I pass through Mercer Park every day – it’s a five-minute walk between the bus stop and my apartment, and I’ve been doing it for six years. I have a mortgage I’m three months behind on and a mom with early Parkinson’s I’m trying to keep out of a facility. I’m telling you this because I need you to understand I’m not a bad person. I’m just tired.
There’s a woman who’s been sleeping on the bench near the fountain for about two months. I’d say she’s maybe sixty, but she could be younger. Her name is Deborah – I know that because she has it written on a piece of cardboard she keeps tucked under the bench. I started leaving a granola bar on the end of the bench a few weeks ago. She never said anything to me and I never said anything to her. That felt like enough. That felt like I was doing my part.
Last Thursday I got off a double shift. It was almost midnight. I sat down on the OTHER end of the bench because my feet were gone and I couldn’t make it another block without stopping.
Deborah looked at me and said, “You’re a nurse.”
I said yes. I asked how she knew.
She said she could tell by the shoes. She said she used to be able to spot anyone in a hospital from fifty feet.
I asked her what she meant by that.
She told me she was an ER attending at Mercy General for eleven years. Trauma surgeon before that. She said her name was Deborah Vance and I could look her up if I didn’t believe her.
I didn’t say anything for a second.
She said, “I’m not asking you for anything. I just wanted you to know I see you.”
I went home and I did look her up. And I sat there on my kitchen floor reading what came up on my screen, and I thought about the granola bars, and I thought about the six years I walked past that bench, and I thought about every single shift I’ve ever worked, and I thought about what I actually believe about myself.
My friends are split. Half of them say I did nothing wrong – I’m not a social worker, I’m not her doctor, it’s not my job. The other half won’t look at me the same way.
I went back to the park the next morning.
She was still there.
I sat down next to her and I opened my mouth to say something, and what came out was –
What I Found on That Kitchen Floor
“I’m sorry.”
That’s what came out. Two words. Barely above a whisper, sitting on the cold tile with my phone in my lap at 1:17 in the morning.
I’d found her. Not a Deborah Vance who matched, not a maybe-this-is-her. The actual her. There was a photo from 2009 in a hospital newsletter, Mercy General’s annual fund drive thing, and she was standing with a group of residents and she was laughing at something off-camera. She looked like someone’s mom. She looked like a woman who had a dry cleaning bill and a parking spot with her name on it.
The article listed her as Dr. Deborah Vance, Attending Physician, Emergency Medicine. There was a quote from her about the importance of community health outreach. The irony of that sat in my stomach like something I’d swallowed wrong.
I kept looking. It took about forty minutes of clicking before I found anything that explained the gap between that newsletter photo and the cardboard sign under a park bench. A court document. Public record. A malpractice suit that went sideways, then another, then a license suspension in 2016. There were forum posts on some physician review site, a few lines in a local news article from 2018 that mentioned her name in connection with a hospital that had closed. After that, nothing. She just stopped appearing on the internet the way people do when the internet stops being somewhere they can afford to exist.
I don’t know the whole story. I probably never will.
But I sat there on my kitchen floor and I thought about the granola bars and I wanted to throw up.
The Report I Filed
Here’s the part I haven’t told my friends yet. All of them.
About three weeks before that midnight conversation, before she told me her name, before any of it, I filed a complaint with the city’s parks department. Online form. Took maybe four minutes. I checked the box that said “encampment/unauthorized use of park space” and I described the bench and I gave the cross streets and I submitted it and I went to bed.
I did it because I’d had a bad week. I did it because I’d seen her go through a bag one night and I’d convinced myself she was going through someone else’s bag even though I didn’t actually know that. I did it because she was there every day and it was starting to feel like something I had to navigate, like another thing asking something of me.
Nothing happened. The city’s response time on those things is apparently measured in geological epochs. No one came. She was still there the next day and the day after that and the day I sat down at midnight with dead feet and she looked at me and said “you’re a nurse.”
I think about that a lot. The timing of it. That I had already tried to have her removed before she ever said a single word to me.
What She Said the Next Morning
I sat down next to her. Not at the other end. Next to her. Maybe two feet of space between us.
She had a cup of coffee. I don’t know where it came from. It was in a paper cup from a gas station and she was holding it with both hands.
I said I was sorry. I told her I’d looked her up. I said it like a confession, which I guess it was.
She didn’t react the way I thought she would. She didn’t say “oh honey” or get angry or get emotional. She just looked at the fountain for a second and then she said, “What did you find?”
I told her. The newsletter. The court stuff. The gaps.
She nodded. She said, “That’s most of it.”
I asked if she wanted to tell me the rest.
She said, “Not particularly.”
And then she said, “Why are you sorry? You left granola bars. Most people don’t do that much.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I’m still not sure I do.
The Thing About Being Tired
Here’s what I know about myself. I am not a bad person. I also filed a form to have a doctor removed from a park bench because she was inconvenient.
Both of those things are true.
My friend Patrice, who is a social worker and has approximately zero patience for self-pity, told me that individual guilt is the enemy of structural thinking. She said the problem isn’t that I didn’t do enough for Deborah. The problem is a system that takes someone with eleven years of emergency medicine experience and lands her on a bench in a park while I walk past her twice a day for six weeks and feel like a granola bar covers it.
Patrice is right. She’s usually right. And I also think she’s giving me a little too much cover.
Because the form. I keep coming back to the form.
I didn’t file it because I was thinking about structural failures. I filed it because she was in my way. Because I was tired and she was a problem and the path of least effort ran straight through that online submission portal.
That’s the part I can’t logic my way out of.
What Happened After
I went back every morning for two weeks. Not every morning because I’m a good person. Because I couldn’t stop going. There’s a difference.
Some mornings she talked. Some mornings she didn’t. She told me she had a daughter in Portland she hadn’t spoken to in four years. She told me the thing that undid her wasn’t the lawsuits, it was the year after, when she tried to come back and found out how quickly a career like that can stop being yours. She said it in a flat, factual way, not like she was looking for sympathy, more like she was reporting findings.
She asked me about my mom once. I told her about the Parkinson’s, the facility question, the cost of it. She asked specific questions, clinical ones, what stage, what medications, what the tremor pattern looked like. For about twenty minutes she was just a doctor talking to a nurse about a patient and I forgot everything else.
When she was done she said, “She needs the occupational therapist before she needs the facility. Push for that first.”
I did. My mom’s OT started three weeks ago.
I’m not telling you that so this story has a tidy exchange in it, help given and help returned. I’m telling you because I want you to understand what was sitting on that bench while I was filing forms.
Where We Are Now
Deborah is still in the park. She’s not in a shelter. She’s looked into it and she has her reasons and they’re hers.
I brought her a proper coffee last Tuesday. The kind from the place on Clement Street, not gas station. She said “the oat milk is unnecessary but I’ll allow it” and that was the closest I’ve seen her come to a joke.
I’m still behind on the mortgage. My mom’s still sick. I’m still tired in the specific way that twelve-hour shifts make you tired, the kind that lives in your joints.
But I think about that form I filed. I think about the four minutes it took. I think about how easy it is to decide that your exhaustion is a reason and not just a feeling, and to let that decision travel from your brain to your fingers without stopping anywhere that might slow it down.
My friends who say I did nothing wrong, I understand why they’re saying it. I do. But I think they’re being kind to me in a way that doesn’t actually help me.
The other half, the ones who won’t look at me the same way.
I’m not sure they’re wrong either.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on. Someone else needs to sit with it too.
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