Swallowed up in the cracks

A.K just turned 60 a couple weeks ago. They have no children. "Our son died when he was seven and we were too heartbroken to try again."  Years ago when she married B.K they talked about this time as the beginning of their golden years, when they would begin to slow down from the hectic pace of working long, hard hours in backbreaking jobs.

 In their thirty years together, they've worked at just about every job they could find in their small community of loggers, fishers, and construction workers. They picked berries and daffodils in the fields as teenagers, and instead of college, after high school they went straight into the working world. It was what everyone they knew did. It was what their parents did and grandparents did. It always provided a basic living if you didn't need too many frills, and it was  "honest" work that paid into the social security they would one day collect.

The first part of the dream ended when A.K's body could no longer do the heavy physical labor required for most of the jobs. The years of stress had taken a toll on her body and standing for more than a couple hours caused her feet to swell painfully to the point where she fainted at work one day. Since their jobs were always contract labor, there was no insurance. The emergency room doctor sent her home with a prescription for blood pressure medication she never filled because without her income there was no extra money.

She tried to apply for charity care but because B.K. was still working, she was given a payment schedule instead. "I could pay the power bill or I could pay the hospital bill," she told me. She never answers the phone anymore unless she know who it is because the debt collectors call several times a day even though she's told them she has no money and isn't working.

In the next year she managed to pick up a few temp jobs but most of them required standing for long periods of time and she had to turn them down. Then the recession hit and there was no longer jobs to turn down. At the age of 58, there were few options.

"It was a horrible time. B.K's hours were cut in half and then he was laid off. We couldn't pay the rent anymore. The car broke down and we couldn't afford to fix it. Our electricity got turned off."

Because both she and B.K. grew up in the county, he was able to pick up the occasional job through word of mouth and decades of family connections. But soon, not even those connections could provide anything more than an occasional twenty or forty dollar day every couple weeks. B.K's unemployment ran out. They moved to a tiny cabin far away from most services because it cost only a few hundred dollars a month to live there. But it was thin-walled with no insulation and uncomfortably cold in the winter.

And then B.K. got a job helping a friend who owned a landscaping company. The two of them made enough to survive if they lived frugally. A.K. finally convinced B.K. to let her apply for food stamps because there was no way they could afford to eat without them. The two hundred dollars a month allowed them to supplement their very basic diet with fruits, vegetables, and cheap hamburger meat.

"We were getting by," she tells me. "It was close to the bone living, but we were getting by, which is more than a lot of people were."

And then disaster hit. B.K. began to feel ill and could barely get out of bed. A.K. went to work for him a few days and after a few hours, her arms were so numb she couldn't feel the lawnmower. She sat down on the ground and her friend had to help her up because she could no longer get up by herself. She didn't know what caused it because she didn't want to go to the hospital. "I owe them money. They won't even look at me until I pay them."

When B.K. started vomiting blood, A.K. drove him to the emergency room. After several weeks and thousands of dollars worth of tests later that they won't be able to pay for, A.K. was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 59. He's applied for disability, fully aware that he probably won't live to collect it as it takes months and he's not sure he has months.

But it's not his own mortality he worries about, it's A.K's survival. He has no social security because he's not old enough so there are no survivor's benefits for her. She's not old enough to collect on her own yet. They have nothing except beat up old furniture, an old tv, and a car that breaks down every few weeks. There's very little work she can do and few who would hire a 60 year old woman whose only skills are a life time of hard work. What B.K. wants more than anything right now is to live for two more years because then A.K, can apply for early retirement at age 62 and collect partial social security instead of the full amount if she was been able to wait five more years.

But even the doctor who like all doctors is adverse to time tables when it comes to dying patients wanting to know how long they have, will only commit to "at least a year."

This is the very large crack that is waiting to swallow up a whole lot of people like A.K. and B.K. who worked all their lives and now when they should be planning their retirement as reward for all those years of hard work, are desperately trying to figure out how to survive when one of them is dying and they're both living on the promise of a disability check that may not come for months, because the reality is that for those in their 50's, there are no safety nets. There is just a big empty hole waiting to swallow them up.<br>


Falling Through The Crack

Old, Sick, Cold, and Forgotten

As part of my desire to give a voice to those forgotten and ignored by a system that does nothing to help the elderly, poor, and powerless in America, here is the story of A.J, a 63 year old woman from Bellingham, Washington who tried to get help paying her heating bill and fell through the very wide cracks of a program that was supposed to help people like her. We met in the grocery store and had a delightful conversation and agreed to get together for coffee at her apartment a week later. She's the reason I'm telling not only her story, but that of several people I've met since.


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The first thing you notice about A.J. is her hands. They are twisted and knotted from arthritis. She treats the pain with the cheapest over the counter medicine she can find but it barely helps. She tells me she is not old enough for Medicare and she hasn't seen a doctor in over fifteen years except for the time she caught Pneumonia during the winter. Her neighbor drove her to the emergency room at Peace Health hospital in Bellingham on a day so cold all her houseplants froze and died by the time she returned home  hours later.

They gave me a prescription I never filled because I didn't have the money and then they sent me home on a bus.  It took over a month before I could even get out of bed without feeling dizzy and nauseated. They gave me a pile of forms to fill out for charity care but I didn't have a tax return since I didn't keep a copy, so they wouldn't accept any of the rest of the papers I gave them showing my 657 dollar a month social security I get from taking early retirement last year. The account went to collection and they call me constantly wanting their money.


A.J. lives in a tiny studio apartment with mold growing around the windows and in her bathroom. It costs her 550 dollars a month and she pays for heat and water. It's all she has left to show for nearly twenty years of office work for a local company that went bankrupt three years ago. At first she worked for temp agencies until her hands could no longer type accurately. Her car quit running a year ago and sits under a tarp in the parking lot waiting for the day she can afford to have someone tell her what's wrong with it. She gets a little over a hundred dollars a month in food assistance. When that runs out about mid month, she walks to the food bank around the corner and survives on food that is mostly cheap white bread, tuna, canned soup, rice and beans. An average meal is plain oatmeal for breakfast, a tuna sandwich on white bread for lunch, and canned soup with beans or rice mixed in for supper. She can't remember the last time she had a piece of fresh fruit or vegetables that didn't look like they were fished out of a dumpster. She drinks tea several times to day to stay warm because it is always cold in her apartment.

I try to keep the heat low because I can't afford to keep my home warm. I wrap up in a blanket and drink tea. I listen to the radio and read because I can't afford television or internet service. My phone is 9 dollars a month under the Life Line program but if I call anyone outside of the area, it's 12 cents a minute so I can only make local calls.


You can feel the wind blowing through her windows. The caulking around them is cracked and falling off. The mold fills in the places where the caulking used to be. The baseboard heat doesn't reach the rest of the room so A.J. sits huddled next to it and tries to stay warm. But the bill for heating her tiny apartment in January when she was trying to recover from Pneumonia was 150.00 dollars. The next month it was the same. By March she was facing disconnection, even though she sent 50 dollars out of her meager check and didn't buy any extra food other than what she received from the food banks. She also didn't pay her water bill and is waiting for it to be disconnected any day for non-payment. She tried to get help from the Whatcom Opportunity Council and was told all the aid was given out already and she could try in April for emergency assistance funded through a one time grant from Puget Sound Energy.

You have to call from 9 am until 2 pm on just one Saturday. I have an old phone and arthritis but I dialed constantly for 6 hours. When I finally got through, I was told all the crisis appointments were given out and there was nothing they could do for me. They gave me something called a future appointment in July. I called Puget Sound Energy and asked if I could be put on a time payment to carry me through until the appointment. They refused because my bills were too high. I asked if there was anything I could do, anyone who could help me keep my heat on. They told me to start calling churches and asking them for help. I couldn't even pick up the phone without it falling out of my hands anymore so I gave up.


A.J. took the one thing of value she had left and sold it to get the 150 dollars Puget Sound Energy demanded of her to keep her heat on: her wedding ring. Her husband died last year after nearly four decades of marriage. She still owes the funeral home for his cremation and the account was sent to a collection agency that calls and threatens to take her social security check if she doesn't pay up immediately.

When he put it on my finger I told him I'd never take it off and all those years I kept my word. Wherever he is, I am sure he would not hold it against me. He wouldn't want me to be cold. He wouldn't want me to hurt from the arthritis because I can't keep my hands warm. He would understand.


But that was last month and now her power is once again scheduled to be disconnected. And that appointment with the Opportunity Council to get that heating assistance from Puget Sound Energy in July? The appointment is at 8:30 am. But the office doesn't open until 9 am. She was too heartsick to call and ask if it was a mistake so I called for her. I tried for an hour and couldn't get through. The line was constantly busy.

I gave her my last ten dollars. I went to the store down the street and squeezed out some room on my credit card and bought her some food. We both cried when I handed her the small bag of groceries, me because it was so little, she because it was proof someone did care whether she lived or died. I made a few more phone calls trying to find help for her but there isn't anything out there for a 63 year old woman with no children (her only child died in a car accident almost ten years ago), no job, and no one to turn to who gives a damn about the old, the poor, and the powerless in America.