As the final streaks of light faded from the sky, Gretchen Wibel sank into the driver’s seat of her old Chrysler minivan, gingerly sliding her swollen feet into the narrow floor space beneath the steering wheel.
Her 85-year-old body fit into the now-familiar position. Beads of sweat blossomed on her forehead as she cracked the windows to let in any wisp of a breeze, but the heavy stillness in her vehicle persisted as it had for the past several days. Though emergency heat advisories warned of perilous temperatures, Wibel had no alternative.
She parked in the emergency room lot at Concord Hospital. She kept coming back because it was the only place where she knew she could find a bathroom in the middle of the night. The more time she spent there, the more she worried about being kicked out.
Shifting her weight, she tried to settle into her makeshift bed. Garbage bags full of clothes, labeled in Sharpie by type, and cardboard boxes of kitchen gadgets crammed her car to the brim, preventing her from reclining the seat, even a little. She removed the headrest to give her a smidgeon more clearance.
She kept the items she deemed important on the passenger side — an empty plastic water bottle, a light pink hand towel, and a hardcover mystery book. A cloth Market Basket shopping bag filled with paper napkins, a pack of Skinny Pop popcorn, and a nursing home application sat atop an unzipped suitcase.
Lulled by the hum of cars driving on Langley Parkway below, Wibel willed sleep to overtake her amid the oppressive heat.
Having suddenly become homeless at the end of June, Wibel has spent the past few weeks living out of her car with broken air conditioning. Its blue paint and rusty sides decorate the only place she now calls home. She’s one of hundreds of individuals in the state who find themselves unexpectedly unhoused and needing to survive — without a roadmap to do so.
“I keep saying, somehow things are going to work out,” she said.
Finding housing quickly has proved elusive, even in the state’s capital city with all of its resources. Wibel’s decades-long battle with alcoholism, her extensive criminal record and her age have stacked the chips against her. Even well-meaning advocates have struggled to find avenues to help.
“There’s got to be a better way — in some ways, I don’t know what kind of way — that you can help people,” Wibel said. “You don’t just put somebody out on the street and say, ‘okay, you’re on your own.’”
On the precipice
On Wednesday, June 24, Wibel sat on the couch of her air-conditioned hotel room, hands folded in her lap as she waited for 11 a.m. to approach.
Minutes on the clock ticked closer to the hour.
On the coffee table at the Hilton DoubleTree, her Android phone rested face-up, its recently shattered screen remaining dark. She had spent the morning calling anyone she could think of — her daughter in Whitefield, the Doorway crisis center at Concord Hospital, the Department of Health and Human Services.
But no magic solution materialized.
As she pondered her plight, she picked up the phone and called the newspaper. The Monitor has been following her as she navigates homelessness for the first time and attempts to access resources to become rehoused.
Fifteen minutes before her deadline to leave the downtown hotel, the 85-year-old rose and began gathering the last of her belongings, stacking them on a bell cart by the door. The majority of her possessions remained stuffed inside her car, parked in the first handicapped spot out front for the past two days.
She maneuvered the cart into the elevator, then through the lobby, where she handed her keycard to the receptionist.
As she crossed the threshold to the parking lot outside, reality crashed over her.
“It’s really hit me, because I just don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be doing,” she said.
With a businesslike focus, she slowly lifted her bags off the cart and rested them on the ground. At first, the trunk of her 2008 Pacifica refused to open. When the door finally yielded, Wibel had little space to fit her red suitcase and clothes, let alone her body.
Wibel was unsure where she’d go next. The day — and all the ones to follow — lay ahead as one giant question mark.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with myself.” She shook her head, then closed the passenger door.
‘In a mess’
Her predicament began with a four-pack of eight-ounce bottles of white wine. Wibel passed them regularly at the grocery store and couldn’t shake the temptation.
She knew she shouldn’t buy alcohol. But her addiction overrode any voice of logic inside her head.
For over a year and a half, Wibel had been living in the home of a couple with deep religious convictions and a sober policy for their private residence. She first met them when she was an inmate at the Shea Farm prison facility in Concord, where they volunteered for Bible study.
“Okay, I got myself in a mess by the alcohol,” she said. Bringing it into their house was “a horrible sin.”
She acknowledged that many of the difficulties in her life stem from drinking, which she said gives her “an adrenaline rush.” It began in the 1980s with the deterioration of her marriage and the start of occasional physical abuse from her husband, she said.
In 1990, Wibel was sent to state prison for setting her neighbor’s house on fire. She was convicted of lighting a series of department store fires throughout the 2000s, which landed her back behind bars, as did a number of parole violations for consuming alcohol.
When the Pittsfield couple offered her a $ 600-per-month lease on a room with a bathroom attached, they did so with some stipulations: no drinking and no smoking.
“All I hear is everybody’s disappointed about the drinking thing: ‘You knew you couldn’t bring alcohol in there.'” She chuckled wryly, revealing a smile punctuated by several missing top teeth. “I did know.”
This wasn’t the first time she violated house rules, she said, but it proved the final straw in Pittsfield. Her daughter in Whitefield paid for her to get checked into a detox facility in Worcester, Mass. She returned to New Hampshire eleven days later to find her stuff packed haphazardly into her car.
Panicked, Wibel called her daughter with a request: Could she put her up in a hotel for two nights as she figured out next steps? Her daughter agreed, and Wibel checked into the Doubletree.
Wibel is aware that drinking is problematic for her — it’s one of the reasons why she can’t stay with any of her four kids, two of whom live in New Hampshire.
She speaks of her past matter-of-factly but still chafes at people’s perception of her alcoholism.
“Everybody thinks I drink every day, and I guess that irritates the heck out of me, because I’m not a daily drinker,” she said.
‘So damn tired’
As the heat sank lower in the air and water vapor began evaporating off the pavement in the Salvation Army parking lot on Clinton Street, Wibel reached into her trunk and lowered a plastic bag labeled “skirts” to the ground. Sunshine beat down through patches of clouds, revealing the slight sparkles in the teal hue of her car. It was 8 a.m. on a Thursday morning, the day after she first slept in the car.
She pulled items out of the bag and refolded them in piles, needing to reorganize them so they would take up less space in the vehicle.
Any movement takes time. An old injury from a fall left her with a weak wrist that she sometimes sturdies with a black brace. A cane bears a portion of her weight when she walks, and lifting heavy loads leaves her struggling for breath.
After half an hour of sorting, her legs began to ache.
“Maybe it’s my age, but I get so tired. So damn tired,” she said, heaving a sigh.
In the first 24 hours, a few needs had quickly become evident: finding a bathroom she could access, staying cool in the summer heat, keeping her phone charged and choosing a place to park for the evening.
After leaving the hotel, she drove to her doctor’s office in Hopkinton, hoping for help. The doctor wasn’t there, though. Then, she sat by Sewalls Falls in Concord for a while, taking refuge in the shade. She checked in with the Doorway crisis management service and tried to get a hold of what she thought was a navigator program through the Department of Health and Human Services.
Someone she’d talked to that first day suggested she go to the Walmart parking lot.
“Good place to sleep in my car,” she mused, then grimaced, her blue-green eyes wary. The wrinkles tightened on her forehead. “That doesn’t turn me on.”
Instead, she’d found her way to the lot outside Concord Hospital’s emergency room, alternating between sitting in her car and the air-conditioned lobby.
As night fell, her mindset grew bleak.
Exhausted and aching from trying to sleep sitting up, she texted her daughter: “I can’t do this.”
When morning arrived, a woman staffing the emergency room told her about a below-the-radar way to shower at a local hotel. The hotel let her in under the guise of using the swimming pool, and she was able to take her shampoo and soap into the locker room.
While her hair air-dried, she’d changed into a red checkered shirt with blue pants before heading to Market Basket, where she bought yogurt and peanut butter and jelly. Then, she drove to the Salvation Army.
She doesn’t eat much, she said. And she hasn’t felt hungry at all recently.
As she finished her repacking for the day, a woman from the Salvation Army stopped to greet her and offered to unlock the door so she could use the bathroom. Wibel attends church at the Clinton Street location and even used to work there. The familiar face wasn’t unexpected.
With a whole day looming ahead, she mulled over her options. She said she is not keen on living in a nursing home. Even so, she’s reached out to the Merrimack County assisted living facility to be put on the waiting list.
“My picture of nursing homes is of old people peeing in their bed and doing all this stuff, which is probably not right. I mean, there may be some people like that, but…” she trailed off.
Wibel decided to try the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness, and she said she wanted to call her daughter again.
As she braced for the rising temperatures and empty hours to fill, she placed a hand on the side of her car. Right now it’s her lifeline.
“So far, it’s running alright. And if it dies, that’s the end of my car. I can’t ever get another one,” she said.
‘It’s getting scary’
Wibel makes $1,168 each month from Social Security and receives $51 in food stamps. Beyond that, she has no other sources of income and little set aside in savings.
She can afford to pay some rent, she said, but not nearly as much as the average price of a studio or one-bedroom.
Price tag aside, the word “arson” on a renter’s application is a death knell to any hopes of leasing a place: “When I fill out forms for apartment stuff, and it says, ‘Are you a felon? Explain.’ And I just put down, ‘I will explain it at my interview.’”
She only needs a room, she said. Nothing fancy, just a place for her belongings and a bed to rest in at night.
Large rental companies won’t even consider her, she said. And the decline of classified ads for smaller, independent landlords makes it difficult to connect with people who might not need to run a criminal background check in order to sign off on a renter.
“It’s not like how it used to be. They used to advertise and I could just call them up and they’d say, ‘Come see the place,’” she said.
Background checks, however, “will really kill you.”
Having grown up in Webster and lived in the Concord area most of her life, Wibel is familiar with many of the resources available to her. She even worked part-time at the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness many years ago, as well as at the Salvation Army. The process of accessing resources, however, hasn’t been as straightforward.
She describes herself as “technologically stupid,” unable to even figure out how to turn on the television at the Doubletree during her stay there. While she owns a smartphone, she struggles to keep track of information through it.
For a whole day, she lost her phone in her overcrowded car and could hear it dinging but couldn’t locate it.
Wibel’s careful to keep the device charged as much as she can, since she knows how vital it is when it comes to getting help. In recent days, however, her phone has been malfunctioning, and she couldn’t make or receive any calls, cutting her off from the world altogether.
Beyond reaching out to the Salvation Army’s McKenna House, she’s called Community Bridges and has been in and out of Doorway at Concord Hospital. Each resource has given her a number of other places to call. She also tried to connect with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Concord welfare office, but she couldn’t find the right buildings without a phone or GPS. Another time, she got disoriented trying to find the cafeteria in Concord Hospital and ended up in a corridor on the other side of the building.
Even before being kicked out of her Pittsfield room, she said she’d gotten herself on a Section 8 housing list. Nothing has come of that so far.
One afternoon, over a week after she left the Hilton, Wibel sat in the corner of the Concord Hospital emergency room, tears dripping down her face. Around her neck, attached to her car keys, hung a lanyard from the Salvation Army with the words “doing the most good.”
Since the end of June, she’s become a frequent fixture in the corner, flying under the radar for the most part as patients checked in at the desk.
On her first weekend living in her car, she checked herself into the hospital after feeling “so sick.”
A doctor diagnosed her as dehydrated and undernourished. Her overnight stay was the first time in several days she’d been able to lie down. It provided a reprieve, even temporarily, from all the uncertainty shadowing her every moment.
The next day, she was discharged and returned to the emergency room as a fly on the wall rather than a patient.
She said the security team at Concord Hospital recognized her car and realized she’s been spending nights there. She said they told her to stay off the premises.
“You say, ‘Oh, I can go home tonight.” Well, I don’t have a home,” she said, defeat written all over her face.
Her voice grew quiet, barely audible. “This just can’t go on. You can’t just sit in your call all night and grab stuff to eat. It’s not a good way to live. People don’t have a clue.”
She stared down at her feet, the skin stretched tight and swollen from lack of movement and dehydration. They were so inflated that she’d struggled to fit them into her Mary Janes that morning.
“It worries me that I get kicked out of places,” she whispered.
In the moments when “it’s getting scary,” a singular refrain echoes through her mind: “I can’t do this.”
The Monitor will continue to document Wibel’s journey through an occaisonal series of articles.
