By BARB ANDERSON
Local Guest Columnist
May 10, 2008 12:13 am
—
Rachel Parsons died. More importantly, she lived. She lived at 1727 Green Street, Williams Emergency Housing Center operated by Haven House Services, Inc. She was 57 when she came to live with us in September of 2007.
Rachel was a quiet woman and very pleasant, wispy and gray, with glasses. Her chore was house laundry. Every Saturday she did house laundry. She didn’t complain. Everybody liked Rachel.
She had health problems, two or three visits to the emergency room over the months, and it was always her heart. On Wednesday, April 9, she went to the hospital and was transferred to another where they performed surgery. She died two and a half hours later.
Finding next of kin seemed pretty straight forward at first. She was a woman with an emergency contact listed in the files.
We contacted Rachel’s emergency number. It was a neighbor in Madison. She really did not know anything about Rachel’s family, but did know she had at one time had been a person of “means,” then had lost it all in some kind of investment, and became homeless after a heart attack a few months back.
We contacted the township trustee about the burial after working with Jewish Hospital’s social worker. They needed a next of kin to release the body. Paul V. Shrader’s Funeral Home had worked with Jewish before and had agreed to take the body. I spoke to Jan Shrader and they needed a next of kin as well.
I called Social Security. They really had very little information; no next of kin, but she had worked for 19 years as a U.S. Postal employee and was born in Casper, Wyo. The records of her employment were not in the file, because she was civil service and had not paid into the system. She left their employment in 1998.
I called Casper, Wyo. from the Jeffersonville Township Trustees Office but it was a deadend.
I Googled her name, social security number and date of birth. I found that she had lived in Los Angeles, Carson City, Nev., Harrodsburg, Ky. and had literally dropped off the map four to five years ago.
We went through her file, her pockets and finally got her purse back. There we found names for a “Rosemary and Frank.”
I spoke to Frank Muzzy in Washington, D.C., on the following Wednesday. He had gone to Cal-State with Rachel Parsons. Did I know she had authored a book? No. Did he know where to find her family? No. He would contact Rosemary, however and they would write an obituary in California.
I called Randy Smith at Destination’s Booksellers and told him the name of the book, “Just A Cat.” He found it on the Internet and told me I could call and order.
There was one book left and it was shipped overnight so I could read her own words at the memorial service.
I got a call from Jan Shrader later that day. They would have to bury her on Friday as the body was decomposing badly and they could not wait anymore. She helped us bury her at Fairview Cemetery that day. Respectfully, Jan allowed us to hold a memorial service at the funeral home the following Wednesday at 2 p.m..
On Monday, the Department of Education called with no names. Congressman Baron Hill’s office was working above and beyond the call of duty trying to find out some information from the Post Office. John Zoty and Liz Palmquist worked and worked, because they too understood someone should know she had died.
Frank called on Tuesday to say he would be thinking of Rachel during the memorial service at 2 p.m. The residents of the shelter sent flowers to Shrader’s.
We cried, because it all seemed pretty horrible. We knew Rachel. She was kind, she loved Boots, the cat, Larry, and was friends with everybody.
How could this happen to someone?
Even after doing this for 23 years, that question haunted me.
The memorial service took place on Wednesday at 2 p.m. A few people came. The book had come. Rachel had sisters; she said so in the book.
We became even more determined to find her family.
At 6 p.m., I got a call from Frank. They had run the obituary and, finally, her sister, Micky Jackson, had been contacted by someone they knew. Her younger sister was dead.
Her story is phenomenal. A college graduate, a federal employee, of well means, a property owner (three at one time, actually a landlord) and she traveled the world. After a heart attack in 1993, she went to Ireland, fell in love with the country and came home to look for Ireland here. She found it in Harrodsburg. Mickey says she bought a farm and two rental properties, then came home, put her home up for sale, and went to live there. She rolled her money into investments, in particular a very large company that seemed to have cheated several Americans. She lost everything when it went south.
Nobody knows why she left Harrodsburg or why she didn’t call her family. She just packed up and left, finding her way to Madison, where she lived peacefully for four years. Her landlord said she was very nice, clean and loved her cats. When she had her heart attack there the last thing she said to them was, “take care of my cats and leave my body to science.” She even wrote a note to that effect.
We did not know. Neither did they, because we could not find each other.
Mickey Jackson said to say “thanks” to this community for caring for her sister and helping her find peace. They have looked for her for five years and they loved her. She said to tell us she did not have to die in a shelter. They would have cared for her had they known.
For whatever reason, Rachel wanted her life this way. We are glad we knew her; I would have wished the same for her family and friends.
Nobody should leave this earth without somebody knowing, and it should not be in the local homeless shelter.
Barb Anderson is director of Haven House Services in Jeffersonville.
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