Tonight — Dec. 21 — is the longest night of the year. It is remembered annually as Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, a time when we reflect on the people who have lost their lives while experiencing homelessness.
Numerous churches and social service organizations will gather today at 3 p.m. on the Capitol Square in downtown Madison to remember those lost to homelessness in 2022. The Longest Night Homeless Persons Memorial Service will have a brief outdoor service that will be proceeded by a horse-drawn procession around the capitol.
“We’ll gather for a brief service of remembrance. So we have representatives from the Christian tradition, Jewish tradition and Muslim tradition. We will read the names of individuals who have been submitted who have died this year — one or two died at the end of last year after we had had the service,” Linda Ketcham, executive director of JustDANE, tells Madison365. “We will be remembering 32 individuals this year.
“This year, the 32 individuals all were unhoused or had been chronically homeless and then found housing,” Ketcham continues. “There is actually a phenomenon that’s been studied quite a bit and it is not at all uncommon for someone who’s been chronically homeless within the first year of finding housing, they passively just die. They die in their sleep. It’s like their body was just like, ‘Okay, well, I can let go.’ It’s a pretty common phenomenon and we remember them, as well. Their friends have submitted their names and they have close ties and friendships within the homeless community.”
The first Longest Night Homeless Persons Memorial Service was held in Madison in 2008. Just Dane (formerly Madison area Urban Ministry) became involved in the coordination of the event the very next year inspired by the death of 38-year-old Dwayne Warren on the Capitol Square. Warren was experiencing homelessness and died of sepsis, a blood infection that could have been treated with a simple antibiotic prescription. His death prompted Madisonians who knew him to draw more awareness to the issue of homelessness in the community and nationwide.
“It was the people who worked in the Capitol and worked on the square that knew Dwayne and when we held a funeral service for him at First Congregational [Church] and several congregations helped to put that together, those were the people who came,” Ketcham says. “They were people who worked downtown who befriended Dwayne … they’d have a cup of coffee with him and walked with him to their jobs.”
Ketcham says she remembers vividly one woman who spoke at Warren’s funeral telling a story about how she tripped and spilled her coffee and all of her papers on the Capitol Square.
“She said, ‘Everybody that looked like me in their professional garb just walked by me and nobody asked if I was OK or needed any help. But there was Dwayne who came over and helped me up and got my papers together and asked if I was OK.’”
The woman, Ketcham adds, recounted looking forward to seeing Warren every day and how she knew something was wrong when she didn’t see him on the day he died.
“Dwayne was just 38. He had a blood infection from sores on his feet,” Ketcham says. “So we meet near the spot where he passed to remember Dwayne.”
Today’s gathering place for the Homeless Persons Memorial Service on the Capitol Square will be at the intersection of E. Main, S. Pinckney and King Streets, near the bench where Warren’s body was found on June 16th, 2009.
Organizers have created memorial cards for each of the 32 individuals remembered at the event, and for those who may have passed and been remembered in previous years. Ketcham says they want to make sure that every single person is remembered.
“We appreciate very much the work the City of Madison does to track people who have passed away due to homelessness based on data of names that get submitted to them. We also send it out to the homeless services consortium and then other providers or other individuals who work in the area who submit names to us, too,” Ketcham says. “Sometimes we get a little bit of information to know the person a little bit. When we don’t, I look for obituaries and look for additional information for the individuals so that we have a little more about them to put in the booklet.”
Sometimes, however, it’s just the name of the person, Ketcham adds, and when they died.
“We still want to remember them and there are people out there who love them and cared about them. The National Coalition for Homelessness, that started this Longest Night over two decades ago, reaches out to all the various ceremonies around the country like ours and asks for the names of the individuals and the information that we’ve collected because they’re wanting to put together a national database so that family members who maybe have lost track of loved ones can search that database and see if they can find a loved one.”
At the annual event, Wayne and Nancy Osterhaus and their Clydesdale team lead a horse-drawn hearse processional around Capitol Square.
“The Osterhaus family comes down from the Baraboo area with their Clydesdales and antique cars to lead the procession around the Capitol,” Ketcham says. “They’ve been doing this now for many years, too, and they do it because they want to be part of the service and they want to help be part of raising the awareness.”
The Longest Night Homeless Persons Memorial Service not only honors those we have lost this past year but also raises awareness about homelessness in Madison and throughout the United States. Holding the event on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, is meant to highlight the rough winter conditions vulnerable residents experience.
“Part of why we have the service outside is because we want people to remember that most of us will leave the service and we will go home to our warm homes,” Ketcham says. “But if you’re on the streets, if we’re living in your car, if you’re camping, we don’t have enough affordable housing. The shelters are tight. There are oftentimes waiting lists, or there’s just not enough room at the shelter. So this kind of lifts the visibility, putting it downtown around the square where Dwayne Warren’s body was found back in the summer of 2009. It reminds people that every night throughout our city and county there are several thousand people who are experiencing some kind of homelessness or in a shelter or in cars … They’re sleeping on somebody’s couch who may kick them back out.
“This event is also about creating visibility of this issue. It’s a march around the state capitol. It is the seat of power. We want legislators to see us there. We want legislators to remember that when making policies we’re only as civilized as a society as we treat the people in our community who are struggling the most.”
