“Somebody That Everybody Loved” 

There’s a gentleman named Erroll Hibbett. Erroll died of cancer, and he was somebody we knew at Room In the Inn (RITI). He was one of the first I remember meeting. His nickname was “Humpty.” Like Humpty Dumpty. Because I think one time he fell off a wall… He was very popular. He knew everybody, everybody knew him. He would often just kind of have this grin on his face. [He was] an older African American man, and you could kind of see the toll of life on his face, but there was also sort of bright eyes and a smile at all times. He was just an extremely funny person, a person who was always willing to help. He was just a big part of the family.

He was extremely easygoing. Probably to a fault, because he didn’t always stand up for himself. He had a really quick sense of humor. He used to help keep our showers clean and things like that. He was always volunteering to do things. When he was 70, our staff took him to Burger King for lunch because that’s where he wanted to go. [Everybody loved him], and everybody had inside jokes with.

He actually helped us identify the need for a residential program for some of our [unsupported] older adults who just simply don’t have any other options… So, he is definitely an important person [to our program] as well.

Early Struggles and Addiction

I think he wasn’t originally from here but had been in Nashville for a long time. He would usually be in a shelter. I knew him sometimes when he would be housed, but those [times] didn’t last very long. We got him into housing multiple times, and he would always end up back on the streets. A lot of his time was spent surviving. Staying out of the weather and things like that.

He didn’t always stand up for himself, and I never heard him verbalize many aspirations. I think he had faced a lot of struggle and a lot of disappointment in his life, and kind of lost hope that there would be anything better for him. I know he had been in the military, and that did not go really well for him.

He struggled with alcoholism, with addiction. He would go through long periods of sobriety, but then just as soon as he wasn’t in a stable place anymore, he would have a relapse. One of the things that we learned after he died was that he did have a really supportive family here in Nashville. They just were not able to have him there with them because of his addiction issues, and that was something that he never, never really got through.

Family Life and a Sweet Tooth

He loved honey buns. He would often have several of them in his coat pockets, and for his 70^th birthday we had a stack of honey buns with candles for his birthday. We were sneaking them in to him at the nursing home as well.

He had a former wife and children. Once we got to know his family after he had died, that allowed us to see what his earlier life was like. They had pictures of him singing and joking and having this great family life, and I would certainly imagine that he deeply wanted to go back to that. Some of the things that we learned from his family at his funeral was how much he loved kids, and what a great father he was to his kids when they were little. They talked about him giving them baths and taking good care of them and presents he would get for them and things like that.

Remembering Those Who Passed

He would go to the doctor, and he had good care at the end of his life. He was under the care of doctors, within a rehab center for a while, and in a hospital at St. Thomas. I can’t remember if he was at St. Thomas when he died or if he was at the rehab center. I don’t remember if anybody was there at the time of his passing. [But] for the last month or two of his life, we were there at least once a day.

One of my jobs at RITI was to keep the list of people who had passed away so that we could remember folks at the end of the year. We also have a memorial tree when you first walk in the door that has names of individuals. I would guess we had 50 -100 people on the list at the end of every year. So, it’s hundreds of people that I’ve known who have died on the streets for sure. And every year I would go out to the cemetery where our folks were buried [with] other staff members, and we would look at the graves—and that’s how we would find out a lot of the folks who died.

I think people need to remember that homelessness is a circumstance; it’s not a type of person. The people who are impacted by homelessness have decades of their lives taken away, and it’s up to all of us to realize that housing is a fundamental human right, that we all have to play a role in solving this issue—because lives are literally being taken away from people.

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