The homeless brother I cannot save

We read about numbers of homeless, but families know their names. they become homeless for all sorts of reasons. One of the big ones is mental illness. We read about families so fed up, they can't take it anymore and turn their backs on these people, but some families did all they could. This is about a sister who clearly loves her brother but because of mental illness he lives on the streets. If you have someone in your family living on the streets, you may find some sort of comfort from reading this heartbreaking story from a sister. If you judge the homeless as just being lazy, then you should read this to understand why so many are homeless. Society turned their backs on the mentally ill a long time ago.

The homeless brother I cannot save

By Ashley Womble

A year ago, Jay traded my parents' home for the street. But the more I try to help him, the more I lose myself.

Like any New Yorker, I was no stranger to homeless people. I passed by them on my way to the shiny glass tower where I worked for a glossy women's magazine: the older lady perched atop a milk crate in the subway station, the man curled up in a dirty sleeping bag and clutching a stuffed animal. They were unfortunate ornaments of the city, unlucky in ways I never really considered.

Until one hot summer day in 2009 when my little brother Jay left his key on the coffee table and walked out of his house in West Texas to live on the streets instead. In the days that followed I spent hours on the phone with detectives, social workers and even the FBI, frantically trying to track him down. A friend designed a "Missing" poster using the most recent picture I had of him wearing a hoodie and a Modest Mouse T-shirt, a can of beer in his hand and a deer-in-headlights expression on his face. I created a Facebook group and contacted old acquaintances still living in our hometown of Lubbock, begging everyone I even remotely knew to help me find him. No luck. If it had been me, a pretty young white woman, chances are my face would have been all over the news -- but the sudden disappearance of a 20-year-old guy with paranoid schizophrenia didn't exactly warrant an Amber Alert.

In the year and a half that mental illness had ravaged my brother's mind, I'd learned to lower my expectations of what his life would be like. The smart kid who followed politics in elementary school probably wouldn't become a lawyer after all. Instead of going to college after high school, Jay became obsessed with 9/11 conspiracy theories. What began as merely eccentric curdled into something manic and disturbing: He believed the planners of 9/11 were a group of people called "The Cahoots" who had created a 24-hour television network to monitor his actions and control his thoughts -- a bizarre delusion that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Eventually, his story expanded until "The Cahoots" became one branch of the New World Order, a government whose purpose was to overturn Christianity, and he had been appointed by God to stop it.
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The homeless brother I cannot save