Long, sad story of a homeless Vietnam Vet who froze to death in a Portland graveyard.
http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=123197599002944700"Renters at the apartment house on Southwest Jefferson Street in Goose Hollow had been patient. They’d let the homeless man camp underneath their front porch for a week.
But the smell of urine and alcohol was becoming overpowering. And then the man, who was frequently drunk, began breaking glass containers, which the renters had to clean up.
They asked him to leave. They left notes, explaining that the landlord was due for an inspection. Finally, on Thursday night, Dec. 18, with the first knife’s-edge cold of another winter storm approaching, they called the police, who found the homeless man had outstanding warrants for public intoxication and trespassing.
***
Grigorieff was buried Jan. 6 in a military ceremony at Willamette National Cemetery in Southeast Portland. An honor guard saluted Grigorieff with a volley of shots that sent a momentary shock wave through the quiet Mount Scott air. Two soldiers precisely folded a U.S. flag and a solitary bugler played taps.
The ceremony was attended by three members of Grigorieff’s family and a fourth person, a woman unknown to the family. With a scarf covering her head so that only her striking, angular face and wisps of silver hair showed, she introduced herself as Carole van Dyke and explained that she had discovered Grigorieff’s body at Lone Fir Cemetery.
Van Dyke said she lived near Lone Fir, and that she takes a walk there every afternoon, to a favorite spot where she often stops to sit beneath two yew trees. On Sunday, the day before Grigorieff died, she had laid in the snow a few yards away from the yew trees and let snowflakes settle on her face as she thought about how sad and lonely she had been. She had, in fact, thought vaguely about ending her life.
“I felt like it would be very easy to pass on,” van Dyke said.
Eventually, van Dyke moved her arms and legs and made a snow angel, stood and walked home. The next afternoon, Monday, she returned to the yew trees and found Grigorieff already dead from exposure. She noticed his two pair of blue nylon running pants and thin cotton socks. Nearby she found a quarter, a nickel, a dime and two pennies Grigorieff had apparently dropped or scattered.
In van Dyke’s mind, she and Grigorieff had connected for a reason.
“I felt like he was a messenger, a gift to me,” says the soft-voiced 56-year-old. “The message was, maybe I’m meant to stick around a little longer.”
Cassandra Tebo, the Portland police officer who responded to the 9-1-1 call, found Grigorieff in the same position as van Dyke had – shoes off, jacket unbuttoned, shirts lifted up so his belly was exposed. Maybe he was waiting to die, maybe he was too drunk, and too far into the late stages of exposure, to know what he was doing.
With the storm in full fury, Tebo says, even the hardcore homeless were in shelters.
“When you drove the streets that night, you didn’t see anyone out,” she says.
But there was Grigorieff, his position unmistakable.
“He had done a snow angel,” Tebo says."
:bannanasad:
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