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Hard old world sometimes [1]

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Date: 2022-11-16

I'm sad tonight, friends. Sad, because a man my kids and I knew was found dead in Portland last week. I say we knew him but in actuality, we had spoken to him a handful of times around our small town in several different parking lots. His name was Nick and we met him that first time when my 15 year old flagged him down panhandling in the McDonald's parking lot. He was a mess, obviously high as a kite but jovially, not scarily. He took the few bucks that my son offered, thanked us both sincerely and we had a short but endearing conversation. He was hilarious. When we pulled out of the restaurant, my sides were hurting from laughing at his story about trying to poop in a bush when cars kept driving by. Gross, yes, but it's a fact of being homeless and the way he told the story had us all rolling. The next time, it was Walmart parking lot and he had two carts wrangled together with tree branches stuck in them to make a laundry line to dry his shirts off. We said hi, I helped him with a five and then we went our separate ways. There were about two or three other times we ran into Nick. It became a running query whether or not Nick would be there this time. I hadn't seen him in quite a while but you know how it is with someone like that... You know that they drift and they're not known for being stable so I didn't even think about it. So imagine my dismay upon opening up the true crime daily website (yes I'm a white woman in her 40's. It's practically required to like true crime at least a lil) and there third article down the page was Nick's smiling face under the headline "homicide investigation after Oregon man found dead in Portland parking garage". At first I thought I must be mistaken even though he looked like Nick, because we live in Roseburg not Portland. Clicked on it, damn ... His name is listed as Nick Henderson. It's gotta be him. I've been thinking about Nick a lot since I saw that article. About how shitty this world can be sometimes, and how easily we're snuffed out, even the bright little lights. He may have been troubled, but he was funny, smart and most of all he was just another human trying to make it. And I wonder does he have anyone who cares? Will he be buried or will he have a pauper grave? Will they find who did this to him or will they just file it under another homeless person dead? It might seem dumb for me to be this in my feels about someone I only even talked to four or five times, but it has really got me for some reason. So RIP Nick. You probably didn't know it but you really touched our hearts and there are some people who will grieve your loss.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/16/2136716/-Hard-old-world-sometimes

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