Gretchen Wibel held the mostly full bottle of Aspirin in her wrinkled, age-spotted hand.
It was one morning several weeks after becoming homeless. Her outlook was bleak.
As she stared at the yellow-and-white bottle purchased at Market Basket, it all came crashing down upon her. Countless nights spent sleeping upright in her rusty car. Afternoons seeking shade at Sewalls Falls amid unbearable heat. Mornings waking up bleary-eyed as the first rays of light leach into the sky. Feeling constantly “worn down,” with a long list of agencies to call about housing and a very short list of places that had gotten back to her.
If she swallowed the entire contents of the bottle, the uncertainty of it all would disappear. Her 85-year-old bones would no longer ache from sitting upright all the time. Her feet would stop swelling so large that they could barely cram into her black Mary Jane shoes.
As she shifted her weight in the car seat, the Aspirin pills jostled against each other inside the container.
Wibel realized with a jolt that she couldn’t go through with it. With a shaky hand, she slid the bottle into the pocket of her driver’s side door, where it now sits with several other partially-full pill bottles, some generic, some with white prescription caps.
“I’m just desperate sometimes, and I just…” she trailed off, then took a breath. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this—”
She paused, then found a speck of determination.
“I can do it. I don’t know. It just….It’s….” Her thought fizzled.
Only a few days earlier, a resource worker had asked her on a phone call whether she’d been having thoughts of harming herself or others.
“I would never hurt myself or anybody else,” Wibel responded.
That was before she began avoiding the security guards at Concord Hospital, who she said grew wise to her strategy of spending days in the corner of the emergency room — the only place she had been consistently able to find a bathroom or air conditioning since suddenly becoming homeless toward the end of June.
“I think they think I’m gonna bring in all these homeless people, like I go out and invite them in, but yeah, they don’t really want to see me on the property,” she said.
Each time she parks there now, she’s on high alert. But it’s still the only place she can consistently use the bathroom, so she keeps coming back.
The hospital doesn’t have a blanket policy about homeless people staying on its property.
“Concord Hospital’s security personnel respond to reports of suspicious activities and evaluate them on a case-by-case basis to ensure the safety and security of our patients, staff, visitors, and the community,” the hospital shared in a statement.
The Monitor has been following Wibel since her first day of homelessness, chronicling her efforts to access resources and find permanent housing. Her criminal record and her decades-long struggle with alcoholism have thrown roadblocks in her path. She rises each day determined to make it through to the next. The moment with the Aspirin was an anomaly, she said.
‘I haven’t felt like that since,” she said.
She received offers of help — a two-night stay at a hotel, a room in a boarding house in Franklin, food and Gatorade — yet for various reasons, she hasn’t made these connections. In the past two weeks, she’s spent a couple of nights in the hospital for an infection and an afternoon at the county jail to sober up.
Wibel hopes to find something permanent soon.
‘Hard to explain’
Her weakness is white wine.
“It’s just a bad habit I have,” she said. When it comes to drinking, “it’s hard to explain why.”
Her three decades of alcoholism fed her penchant for pyromania, which landed her behind bars multiple times, starting in the 1990s. It’s also the reason she can’t stay with any of her four children.
After several weeks of living in her car this July, she purchased an eight-ounce four-pack of wine.
Wibel had spent the night in the parking lot of the Salvation Army on Clinton Street. In the early hours before sunrise, she had needed a bathroom and drove the 1.3 miles to Concord Hospital’s emergency room to empty her bladder, although she usually tries to avoid driving in the dark whenever she can.
The next morning, after she returned to the Salvation Army, she unscrewed a bottle and began to drink. Once the light, cool liquid hit her throat, she didn’t stop. Then she unscrewed the second bottle.
But someone saw her in the Salvation Army parking lot and called the police.
“Somebody said the way I backed up, it looked as if I had been drinking or some dumb thing,” she said.
She initially was transported to the police department on Green Street, then to Merrimack County Jail in Boscawen, where she stayed in preventative detention until the early evening, when she sobered up enough to be released.
“It just surprised me for them to take me up to county jail. I don’t know why, it just surprised me. I thought, ‘I don’t need this kind of mess,’” she said.
It was a wake-up call of sorts for Wibel, who wasn’t charged with a crime.
“I can’t afford to lose my license. That’s for darn sure,” she said.
Help from strangers
Since the Monitor published its first story on Wibel two weeks ago, several readers have reached out expressing a desire to assist the 85-year-old.
One person offered to put her up in a hotel room for a few nights. Another recommended a rooming house in Franklin with a landlord who might be able to help her secure a spot.
“It feels good,” she said after the messages had been relayed to her. The support signaled that people cared about her plight, that some hope for help was out there.
“You just don’t want people to see you as homeless, and maybe you drink too much, or whatever it is,” she said. “I thought, maybe it’s a good idea to get everything out in the open, let people know exactly what the reality is.”
Yet, as her fatigue accumulates and her body swells, aches and slows, Wibel has been missing meetings, struggling to return phone calls, and feeling lost in confusion, especially pertaining to dates, times and names.
In the third week of July, Wibel wanted to go visit the Franklin rooming house, where she said rent costs $185 per week, which would fit within her $1,168 monthly Social Security allowance. She had spoken to the landlord on the phone, and he’d invited her to come take a look, no appointment necessary. Her previous house in Pittsfield, which she got kicked out of in June for violating the sober policy, cost $600 each month.
The prospect of a roof over her head offered a jolt of optimism she had not felt in weeks.
“There’s some very thoughtful, very good people out there. There really are,” Wibel said, half a smile tugging her lips upwards past her missing front teeth.
She connected with Mary Aranosian, a Concord woman who volunteers with Friends of Forgotten Children and the Coalition to End Homelessness. Aranosian had read the Monitor’s story and emailed to say she’d be happy to assist Wibel with food and hydration.
“Her age is probably the biggest factor since realizing how vulnerable she is,” Aranosian said.
Driving to new places – and even sometimes familiar ones – has grown increasingly discombobulating for Wibel, who recently got lost trying to find her son’s house in Webster and her daughter’s home in Whitefield.
“Sometimes my sense of direction is off,” she said, fiddling with the small amethyst ring on her pinky finger.
She wasn’t sure about driving up to Franklin alone and enlisted Aranosian’s help for a ride.
They set a meeting for 4:15 on Wednesday, July 15 at Sewalls Falls, but Wibel didn’t show up. She had gotten dehydrated again and checked herself into the emergency room. Aranosian decided to try again the next day and confirmed with Wibel, who was discharged after only a few hours at the hospital. But when Aranosian pulled into the parking lot two minutes after their designated meeting time, she passed Wibel in her Chrysler minivan driving away.
Wibel said she’d thought Aranosian wasn’t coming and had sat on a bench waiting before giving up.
They haven’t yet successfully met in person, but Aranosian grabbed a sandwich and some Gatorades last weekend and went to Doorway at Concord Hospital, then the emergency room, hoping to find Wibel and give them to her.
“If she does end up being successful in getting the rooming house, I certainly can get everything that needs to be put into that rooming house, even if it meant helping to buy some of the stuff,” Aranosian said.
Wibel was initially on the fence about calling the gentleman who had volunteered to get her a hotel room — she found the offer generous but overwhelming. The heat and lack of sleep were making her feel lightheaded and weak. She rang him last week, and he secured her two nights at the Quality Inn off of Route 106 for the duration of the weekend.
The Doorway crisis center gave Wibel directions for how to get there. She’s been a frequent visitor to the state-run program since becoming homeless.
“I went up 106. It said something about 106, and I kept going and going, and I thought, I think I missed something. And I don’t know, my mind is so tired sometimes. I just can’t follow directions and stuff. I just finally turned around and went back to Concord,” she said.
Instead of a soft bed in a room with air conditioning, Wibel spent another uncomfortable night in the driver’s seat of her car.
‘I need help now’
Nights remain the most difficult for Wibel, who said she’s growing increasingly “discouraged” at this “lousy life.”
“Living in a car, I think it’s gonna kill me if I just keep it up,” she said.
The thought isn’t as scary to her as it is “realistic.”
“Because, you know, cold weather’s going to come eventually,” she said matter-of-factly. “There’s no way I would sleep in a car when it got freezing cold. I couldn’t do that.”
Despite the recent heat spells, the evenings have been growing cooler. When goosebumps rise on her skin in the darkness, she slides her arms into a white waffle-knit sweater, pulls a blue beach towel over her lap, and closes her car windows. It’s enough for now, but in a couple of months it won’t be.
“I don’t really know what forward is for me,” Wibel said.
Tears pricked at her eyes.
“I know I just would feel a heck of a lot better if I could get out of that car and not sleep in there,” she said. “But just hunting for the bathroom in the middle of the night is absolutely awful.”
She usually needs to go once or twice a night.
Ever since Concord Hospital started paying attention to her presence, she began sleeping at the Salvation Army, while looking for other places to park. People continue to recommend Walmart, but Wibel remains hesitant.
“I don’t think anybody chooses to live on the street,” she said. “And if you don’t have a car, I can’t imagine it.”
Her phone is one of her lifelines. A couple of weeks ago, her Android stopped working altogether. She spent $119 on a new one at the T-Mobile store on Storrs Street. It was a “need,” not a want. Without her phone, she’s cut off from the world and any potential for help.
Wibel tries to stay on top of such necessities as much as she can, but she’s getting tired of it all.
Her feet and ankles inflated during her first week of homelessness — a result of all the sitting. The straps of her black shoes bite into her skin, and the swelling still hasn’t subsided a month later. Wibel knows walking more frequently would help, as would compression socks, but she hasn’t gone out and bought any yet. Her movement hasn’t increased at all. At her age, she just doesn’t have the energy, she said.
She knows she needs to eat and stay hydrated, but neither of those tasks feel easy either, especially because she “hasn’t really felt hungry.” In recent days, she’s nibbled on graham crackers, tried to finish half of a McDonald’s bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on a biscuit, picked at a burger and fries and bought a small cup of yogurt.
“I can’t eat a lot anyway,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve lost weight, but I think my stomach’s shrunk.
One evening earlier this week, as she sat in her car in the lot behind Dartmouth Hitchcock, several days of lower back pain, weakness, brain fog and fatigue washed over her.
Something felt off, she said. Around 5 p.m, as people were driving home from work along Pleasant Street and the Langley Parkway, she shot out a series of frantic texts to people she knows:
“I need help now.”
“Need help behind Dartmouth Hotvjcock hospital.”
“I need tel # for Concord ambulance.”
“I’m to tired. My brain is dead.”
She dialed 611, thinking it was the emergency line, but was dismayed to find someone on the other end asking her about a prepaid bill. A lady in the parking lot helped her reach an ambulance via 911. They transferred her onto a stretcher and transported her across the street to the Concord Hospital emergency room.
“I knew I needed some help, and I didn’t know how. I needed to see a doctor,” said Wibel, who feared that if she tried to walk into the emergency room, she’d be turned away, given how much time she had spent on the premises. Calling an ambulance was “drastic,” she said, but it felt like her only option: “Pain and tiredness, they all lump together,” she said.
A doctor diagnosed her with an infection in her abdomen and prescribed antibiotics. She couldn’t quite recall the details but thought maybe it was a bladder-related problem. It turned out to be a urinary tract infection, which can be dangerous for people her age and cause mental confusion.
The hospital decided to hold her overnight, and she slept “beautifully,” waking the next day at 6 a.m., hours after she typically rises. She spent the morning watching the news on TV and resting in the mechanical bed.
“You forget the comforts of home,” she said, one hand resting on the white blankets covering the bed. An IV entrance tube protruded from her veins.
During her two-night stay, she tried to eat more regularly. It was the first time in weeks she consumed three meals in one day. Wibel relished ordering a bran muffin, cups of coffee, a warm grilled cheese and strawberry ice cream, among other offerings from the hospital’s menu.
A social worker at the hospital connected with her about accessing some housing resources. For the first time since the end of June, Wibel felt like maybe there could be an end in sight to her homelessness.
“I just got that gut feeling,” she said.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please dial 988.
