Things Left Behind

They left behind things. A hodgepodge of things. A helter-skelter of things. Things we wondered about. An unopened ten pound bag of rice. A pruning saw. A little red ceramic pitcher half-filled with pennies.

They left behind a $500 electric bill and a shutoff notice.

They left behind a stack of papers and empty food boxes a good four feet high just carelessly tossed in the small pantry in the kitchen. School papers, old bills, court papers. Photos of the kids.

They left behind two battered tennis rackets, a flat soccer ball, old shoes, broken toys, and three cell phones, one of which blinked a message that the owner needed to deposit more money in order to retrieve any messages.

They left behind empty prescription bottles for meds I know are prescribed for mental health problems and not physical ones.

Dad, mom, and I were cleaning out the things they had left behind when they abruptly vacated the apartment on the heels of an eviction notice for two months unpaid rent. The apartment is one of three in a rundown little rental my brother - the one who recently broke his leg - owns in a down-at-the-heels town about an hour from here.

My mom did not understand why they had left the apartment in such disorder. Her questions peppered the day.

"How could you live like this?"

"Have you ever seen such a mess?"

"How can people live with this kind of filth? I can't imagine, can you?"

After an hour, I ran out of answers. They live like this because…because what?

They live like this because they ran out of options a long time ago.

They live like this because depression, mental illness, and not enough resources will do that to you.

They live like this because these are people who never had a break in their lives.

I filled garbage bag after garbage bag with the papers in the pantry. The eviction notice for an apartment in a town 15 miles that way. The eviction notice for another apartment in another town 14 miles the other way. The court services plans filed by different agencies in different counties for the protection of neglected, dependent children.

My dad and I knelt and ripped up the carpet - stained, dirty, reeking - and carried it to the truck, along with the tennis rackets, the bills, the dirty dishes, and the court services plans. We threw the two different box springs - stained, broken, reeking - on top, cinched the whole thing down, and then drove slowly to the community landfill.

The rental is not a nice one in a good part of town. It is one you would move into if you are just scraping by, or down on your luck, or just fell from "making it each month" to "gotta cut back because my hours got cut." The house is clean and cared for, but it's shabby. My brother, a blue collar guy himself, bought this house with three units in it just before the housing market collapsed in Ohio. He had hoped to work hard at it and make a decent return on his investment, but even before he broke his leg, it was starting to pull him under. His tenants sometimes have to pay the rent in installments, as their unemployment checks come in. Some don't pay at all for as long as they can. With his busted leg, my brother can't get to the house to make the repairs - the broken windows, the new carpet, the scrubbing and cleaning - on this unit, so my parents (and Warren and I when we can) are trying to get it fixed up for him to rent.

The current hard times in this country gnaw at me. I write about them from time to time. The Census Bureau just confirmed what so many of us have known for a long time: the number of poor in this country keeps rising. One in seven adults now lives in poverty. One in five children lives in poverty.

I just cleaned up the detritus of two of those adults and three of those children.

At day's end, I brought home the pruning saw, the rice, and the little red pitcher. The pennies from it went in our loose coins jar. The rice went into canisters.

The little red jug is now sitting on my desk, waiting for better days for us all.

Lest We Forget

There is a local story getting a lot of chatter and some press, involving a young farmhand caught on video brutalizing the cows and calves at the dairy at which he works. He is being charged in a neighboring county with multiple counts of cruelty to animals; bond is currently set at $100,000.

I'm not about to defend or excuse the actions of the defendant, assuming the charges are proven. I am, however, going to call attention to an element to that story that no one is mentioning in all the loud calls for his punishment.

The defendant is a 25 year old Iraqi war veteran.

Our veterans are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious traumatic injuries - some of them physical, some of them mental. They are starting to fill up our courts as defendants, sometimes charged with crimes of violence. One speaker I have heard in recent months attributes this to the fact that today's soldiers are sent over multiple tours of duties and so have repeated exposure to the trauma of the war zone. Where the Viet Nam era veteran typically did one tour in Nam, today's military personnel may do five or six tours in the Middle East.

The problem of traumatized veterans has become so great that there is now a special program in the Veterans Administration, funded by Congress, called the Veterans Justice Outreach Initiative (VJO). VJO focuses on vets in the criminal justice system, linking them to mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, and other needed services. Nationwide, judges are establishing Veterans Treatment Courts, similar to mental health or drug courts, to help get our veterans back on track.

If we are going to send our soldiers to a war with no end, exposing them to the horrors of battle, and expect them to do their duty, then we owe it to them when they come back scarred and damaged to get them the help and services they need.

On Memorial Day, we watch parades, we decorate our family graves. I'm about to head out to watch Warren's daughter march in a Memorial Day parade myself. It is easy on Memorial Day to wave a flag and thank a vet.

It is harder to remember on all the other days of the year that all of our vets need our support and our help. Even when - especially when - something goes wrong.

Our veterans deserve better and so do we.

A Graduation

Late last month, I attended a very special graduation - the first from our municipal court's mental health docket program.

My day job, when I am not hauling plants or percussion instruments, is working on special projects for the Delaware Municipal Court. One of the very special projects that I have been involved in since starting there four years ago was the creation and establishment of the mental health docket.

A mental health docket is what is known as a "specialized docket." Specialized dockets are court programs designed to target a particular population in the criminal justice system and offer alternatives to incarceration and further criminal sanctions. Our docket takes individuals who have a serious mental illness and have been charged with a non-violent misdemeanor and provides them with direction, supervision, and links to other services, including (and especially) regular mental health counseling and treatment. If the individual completes all phases of the program successfully, the original charges are dismissed.

What the mental health docket is, in real terms, is a chance for a participant to get treatment and other services to help them better manage their illness and break a cycle of repeated offenses.

Tiffany came into the docket two years ago, withdrawn, anxious. For the first several weeks, she would sit in court hunched over, not looking at anyone. She always wore a small knit cap pulled all the way down to her eyebrows, with her hair tucked underneath.

Time went by. I do not administer the mental health docket, so I am not in that court regularly. After several months, I dropped in to watch a docket session, noticing all the new faces. I didn't recognize the young woman with the flowing hair until the judge called out, "Tiffany."

I gawked. Gone was the knit cap, the hunched over look. She still anxiously twisted her hands, but she stood up straight and addressed the court.

Shortly before her graduation, Tiffany came to the courthouse to go over details with the docket coordinator. I was assisting at the check-in table that day. I did not recognize her at all until she gave her name. She was older, quieter, more mature looking and acting. Since she started the docket, she has had one child and another is on the way. Her boyfriend, soon to be her husband, was with her this day.

She looked like any other young woman juggling life's responsibilities.

As I walked her back to the coordinator's office, she commented on the weather. The Tiffany I first saw two years earlier would not have looked at me, let alone said anything. The Tiffany of today bravely carried out small talk with only a giggle or two to show her anxiety.

At her graduation a week later, Tiffany stood up proud and happy, her giggles intermixed with her tears. The press release I wrote about that day is at the end of this post.

People with mental illnesses often live on the fringes of society, unable to bridge the gap between their lives and the wider world. Anxiety and suspicion are on both sides and the barriers to fuller participation are very real. One of the hopes and goals of our mental health docket is that the participants gain the tools - of all kinds - to come in from the fringes.

At graduation, you could see that promise in Tiffany's face.

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No cap and gown. No "Pomp and Circumstance." No commencement speaker, unless you counted the judge on the bench.

Yet the graduation ceremony that took place in Courtroom A of the Delaware Municipal Court Wednesday afternoon was every bit as meaningful and joyous as the ones that will take place at colleges and high schools later this spring.

On Wednesday, April 21, Tiffany *** became the first graduate of the court's mental health docket after entering it 24 months earlier. Municipal Court Judge David Sunderman, who established the specialized program, spoke of her accomplishments at graduation.

"This is a happy and tremendous day for all of us, but especially for Tiffany. She has consistently followed her treatment plan and exhibited a desire to improve her life. We hope that this experience will enable her to continue to grow as a person and continue to be a valuable member of our community."

The Delaware Municipal Court established its mental health docket in December 2007. The docket, which Sunderman characterizes as a "problem-solving court program," was created to offer certain mentally ill offenders charged with misdemeanors a program of intense supervision and treatment rather than jail or further criminal sanctions. Judge W. Duncan Whitney operates a similar program at the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas and the two courts share key personnel. Funding for those shared positions is provided in part by grants and in part by the Delaware-Morrow Mental Health & Recovery Services Board.

Mental Health Docket Coordinator Ed Klages, who has been with the program since December 2008, reflected on the success of the program, which currently has 35 participants, 20 of whom are in the municipal court docket.

"The docket is a win-win situation for both the participants and the community," Klages said. "Delaware County is fortunate to have people in the judicial system and social agencies who understand the importance of this kind of collaborative initiative, and are committed to its success."

In the end, the courtroom graduation ceremony felt like any other graduation one has ever attended. There were congratulations from staff and friends. There were flowers and some tears. And there was the optimism on the face and in the words of the new graduate.

"Being in the docket helped me to grow up. I learned to start trusting people. Thank you, everybody, for helping me."