BANGOR, Maine — Robert Johnson Jr. had a daily routine about two years ago. A homeless man, Johnson would get up in the morning, buy alcohol at a local store, and, he said, walk along the Bangor waterfront “and think about how I could throw myself into the water.”
An alcoholic suffering from scoliosis, the 54-year-old totally disabled U.S. Army veteran has spent the last 19 months sober and the last year in housing in Brewer. He had a message for others attending Homeless Vigil 2016 at Hammond Street Congregational Church on Wednesday night:
There is hope.
“Don’t be so quick to judge the homeless,” Johnson said Wednesday. “People can be homeless because of a fire. They can be homeless because the mill closed. They can be homeless because they are ill.”
The social workers and homeless shelter advocates who attended the 11-year-old annual ceremony on Wednesday did so to mourn the people who died without homes in 2016 but also to celebrate the victors over homelessness such as Johnson.
Bruce Hews, campus manager of Hope House, one of the Bangor area’s three homeless shelters, said he knows of 10 homeless people who died during the last year, but added that no one he is aware of has kept an exact count of homeless deaths in the Bangor area.
Homelessness, he said, can come to people the way it fell on Johnson, who had served for six years in the Army as a sergeant — as a culmination of decades of physical pain, and addiction that began as a crude form of self-medication.
For others, it is often undiagnosed mental illness mixed with addiction and of physical and psychological abuse suffered because of the illness and addiction, Hews said. The three most common forms of illness he sees, he said, are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and clinical depression.
And their impacts can take decades to remedy.
“It takes a long time to get the help you need,” Hews said, “and a long time to build up the trust [with clients] you need to treat homeless people effectively.”
Hope House and the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter have 102 beds for homeless people, while Shaw House treats as many as 400 youth who are homeless or at-risk for homelessness, officials said.
They have had some victories over homelessness, said Body Kronholm, executive director of the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter. Over the last three years, the shelters and area social service agencies have dramatically reduced long-term homelessness, which is defined as homelessness among people that lasts more than a year. But the work never ends, he said.
“One of the good things about events like this,” Kronholm said, “is that it brings attention to this issue. We need to keep doing that.”
Johnson credited a network of recovering addicts and social service workers with helping him get back on his feet. He said that next year, he wants to return to helping people suffering from addiction as a substance-abuse counselor, something he had done years before.
“I want to keep moving forward,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to go back to where I have been.”
In Portland, more than a hundred people gathered in Monument Square at dusk Wednesday to remember 32 people from that city’s homeless community who died in the past year. The number is down from last year’s total (an all-time high) of 44.