For Sharon Lazarowicz, the search for her brother, the loner with the big heart and severe drinking problem, is over.
It ended this month with a sigh of relief, a sense of closure and lots of sadness, all rolled into one. That’s how the life and death of Alan Cornish affected Lazarowicz. That’s how the life and death of homeless people often affect family.
And if not for a statewide vigil on Dec. 21, a tribute to the 45 homeless people from New Hampshire who died this year, held in 10 locations, perhaps Cornish’s family wouldn’t yet know that he died at age 61.
The cause of death was inflammation around the heart, from heaving drinking. The cause of death was a hard life. With his long, unkempt hair and scraggly beard, the homeless community called Cornish ZZ Top.
“I’ve been searching for him since I don’t even know,” Lazarowicz told me from her home in Colorado. “The last couple of years I would search for him from time to time. I knew he was always kind of a vagabond and we would get a sighting from time to time. Here I am in Colorado, so it’s always difficult.”
I need to pause here and tell you that my initial phone conversation with Lazarowicz occurred the day before she learned the whereabouts of her brother’s cremated remains, which lie at the Bernier Funeral Home in Somersworth.
Her cousin heard Cornish’s name announced during the Laconia version of the vigil, and that set off a chain reaction, an investigative process that included a call to me and a flurry of other calls.
The family knew, or at least strongly suspected, that Cornish had died, but where was he? How could his sister and two brothers, both of whom still live in state, pay their respects to him?
Sure, he hadn’t led a very clean life, drinking and wandering and getting arrested. But that didn’t matter. Not anymore.
“It’s hard for us to come up with money to help the funeral home,” Lazarowicz told me, shortly after she’d heard the news. “They said they can’t hold him hostage, but anything we can donate would be helpful. We’ll try to raise a little bit and my brother will pick up the ashes in the next couple of weeks, and then I will come there.”
In all, four siblings will reunite. A fifth, their sister Susan, committed suicide in 1990, at age 29. She had gotten into a car accident, smashing her jaw and bones in her face. She became addicted to Percocet. She suffered from depression and had endured the rage of her alcoholic father, Glen Cornish, who beat his wife in front of the kids. Sometimes he’d shove the children.
One day, while in the hospital after overdosing, Susan had had enough. She climbed to the top floor and jumped. She was part of a chaotic mix, part of a family whose inner dynamics, behind closed doors, always seemed off balance.
“My dad in later years, when alcohol got the best of him, he got to become kind of violent and mean spirited,” Lazarowicz told me. “There was a lot of violence in the home. It took a toll on all of us.”
Lazarowicz, it turns out, did fine. She moved to Colorado and owns an electrical contracting business with her husband. She’s an artist, and her paintings on Facebook are wonderful.
Cornish? Like his father, he was a drinker. A helpless, hopeless drinker. Long ago, he climbed into a bottle of beer and chose to stay there, hidden from view.
Jim Cornish, who lives in Manchester, last saw his brother six or seven years ago. He remembers the drinking. He remembers a defeated individual.
“He was in rough shape,” said Jim, the youngest child at 49. “He came to my home and he was out of control. I offered him a shower and to sit down and talk and he was in no shape to do that. At 8 a.m. he’s drinking. A hurtful soul.”
Lazarowicz remembers the demons, which had firmly implanted themselves inside her brother. She tried to help him, but soon realized she was wasting her time. He got a DUI. He tried to get sober. He failed.
“I had my conversations on that,” Lazarowicz told me. “He’d say, ‘Shar, you don’t understand, I was born to be a drinker and I can’t control that.’ He was a functional alcoholic for many years and it slowly started to eat away at him.”
Their parents divorced, their mother settling in Seabrook, their father Kingston. Glen Cornish died at age 61. The same age as Alan. The same cause, too.
Alan Cornish drank and lived at Seacoast campsites that weren’t officially campsites, in Rochester and Somersworth and Portsmouth and Dover, nearly to the day he died. And he drank and lived on friends’ couches when possible, giving him a little more comfort during his otherwise uncomfortable life.
He found time to marry and have a daughter, but broken relationships along the way with those he loved broke him even further. Everyone lost touch with him. There were sightings now and then, but nothing concrete, nothing that the siblings could hold on to.
“I heard he was back in Portsmouth,” Lazarowicz said. “A friend traveled back to New Hampshire with me and we just walked the streets looking for him and we didn’t see him. I tried to do background checks, look at police reports, and every once in a while I’d see a new report that he was in (jail) for public intoxication and I would chase my brothers to help him.”
The brothers had given up. Said Jim, a snowplower and landscaper who admits to his own drinking problem, “In my own mind, it kicks my ass over why didn’t I go help him or be more involved with his life. Then again when I did, he was a train wreck.”
Jim Cornish and Lazarowicz had more to say about their brother, beyond his drinking and lack of direction.
“Awesome guy, wicked friendly,” Jim noted.
Added Lazarowicz, “A humble, gentle soul. He wanted to stay away because he felt like a burden to everyone. Alan thought he was becoming his dad, but he was not a violent man. So he separated himself from family and did not want to be found.”
He wasn’t, until this week, two months after he was admitted into the hospital, basically against his will. His legs had grown numb, his heart weak. It’s unclear how long he stayed, probably a few weeks.
“He just wanted to leave,” Alix Campbell, a homeless outreach specialist for Strafford County Community Action, told me. “He just wanted to go back to his drinking.”
He went to a friend’s home, fell asleep and died the next day. Campbell had tried to move him into support housing. She had tried to convince him to check into the hospital.
She helped arrange the statewide vigil earlier this month. Ten tributes were held, including one here, in front of the state house. Another was held in Laconia. Cornish’s cousin, by sheer coincidence, was there. Campbell had hoped something like that would happen. She had hoped someone would hear about Cornish’s fate, claim his remains, plan to honor him in some way.
“Glad this news got to be where it belonged,” Campbell told me.
Lazarowicz, looking for her brother, called the funeral home in Somersworth minutes before I did. She says she’ll fly here in a few months, when it’s warmer, and meet her two brothers. She wants to spread some of Cornish’s ashes near a huge birch tree in Jackson, where their mother is buried. The rest of his ashes will be buried near their father, in a family plot in Kingston.
She’s thankful for that. She’s also grateful her brother had a place to stay, his friend’s home, at the end.
“A warm place to rest his head, so that made me feel really good,” Lazarowicz told me. “He was not on the sidewalk or the street. He was not cold and alone.”