After leaving the office, she walked a couple of blocks to the LCBO. As usual, the big room was quiet, and four or five people stood at counters, filling in their order form. The LCBO wasn’t much different from a bank, exceptwith booze. With all the paperwork involved, it felt suspiciously like the Liquor Control Board of Ontario was keeping track of what people drank.
She stopped at one of the counters then ran her finger down the list of wines to choose from. Using a pencil chained to the counter, she filled in her name and address, the brands of wine, how many bottles she wanted, and the prices on a specially printed pad of white paper. She brought the paper to the short queue at the till, having signed the bottom line to certify she was over twenty-one, and when it was her turn, she slid her order through a hole at the bottom of the window. She paid the man after he rang it up, and her change jangled down a metal tray as he passed the form back to her. She brought that to the next desk then waited in a second line to hand it to another man, who went back to his shelves and wrapped her two bottles in brown paper bags. What a rigamarole.
On the bus, she held the paper bags on her lap and watched out the window. Her gaze was caught by the sight of a man in a long black coat, walking the other direction. His beard was long and matted, and long hair stuck out stiffly from beneath his cap. He kept stopping in front of passersby with his hand out, but it remained empty. Most people walked around him without a backward glance, but some did give him a second look. Those were rarely kind, and Sassy felt a deep and helpless sympathy for him.
The transient was still on her mind when she knocked on Marion’s door after her supper. Marion praised her wine choices, and they settled in with a couple of glasses. Sassy brought the poor man up to Marion right away.
“He looked so tired, you know? Like he maybe hadn’t slept or eaten in forever. Nobody was paying any attention to him, but I wanted to, like, jump out of the bus and give him all the cash in my purse.”
“Wouldn’t have been a good idea,” Marion murmured. “You didn’t know him.”
“Don’t talk to strangers, you mean?”
“Well, yes, but these days it might be a little more dangerous. And I expect you’ll start to see more and more people like him out there.”
Sassy frowned. “Why do you think that?”
Marion finished her wine then held out her glass for more. “The OntarioHospital, where I work, is shutting down. It’s a huge mistake. They’re calling it ‘deinstitutionalization.’?”
Sassy frowned. “Are you losing your job?”
“No, no. I’ll be working at a new community centre.”
“But I’ve heard that’s what’s best for the patients, isn’t it? They deserve freedom, just like everyone else.”
“I know that’s what people say,” Marion replied, her expression tightening with frustration, “but tell me how that can be true, Sassy. Some of my patients are extremely unstable. They are unpredictable, and they don’t know how to live outside of the institution. If a patient doesn’t know enough to take their medications, if they forget to eat, if they bang their heads against a brick wall until they crack their skulls, how can that be good for them? What’s to stop them going out in the middle of a snowstorm and freezing to death? I know what people say, but the truth is that these patients need to be in a hospital.”
Sassy’s mouth opened slightly with concern. Nothing she’d heard or read in the papers had suggested any of these things. Everyone seemed fully in support of letting the patients out of the hospitals. The picture Marion painted was alarming.
“It’s horrible how this whole transition happened with so little thought to consequences,” Marion continued, “because there will be plenty of those.”
Sassy swallowed some wine. “Like what?”
“Do you really want to hear me complain about this all night?”
“Absolutely. If it matters to you, it matters to me.”
“All right. Well, as they are discharged, the patients will mostly be released to their families, but in many cases, their families won’t be able to care for them. They won’t know how. Then what? If their families kick them out, where will they go? The community health centres are like regular offices, only open during the day. There is nothing set up to provide full-time care for those who need it, and so many will be in need.” Her fingers curled around the stem of her glass. “It’s not just our hospital that’s shutting down, remember. Lakeshore will be emptying out at the same time, with the same problems. And what about the veterans returning from Vietnam, and thegenerations of suffering veterans before them? I’m not exaggerating when I predict that in the near future, hundreds of transients with psychiatric troubles will be wandering around the streets, sleeping on sidewalks or in parks with no protection, no food, no medicine, or anything. Some of those could be dangerous to the public if they aren’t monitored. Others will be tossed in jail, where they will get lost in the system.”
“So the government is more keen on saving money than people?”
Marion gave Sassy a flat look. “Sure feels that way, but I can’t imagine that overloading the jail system will save any money.”
“But there are some places for them to stay, aren’t there? What about social housing? The government is supposedly building twenty thousand houses across Canada every year.”
“Of course,” Marion replied. “Affordable housing. Like when they built Regent Park back in the forties. But those don’t provide what so many of our patients need, which is specially trained doctors and nurses to help them survive. Otherwise, it’s not freedom for them, Sassy. It’s a life sentence.”
“What about rooming houses?”
“There is no care at all for the patients in those houses, just slumlords, basically.”
Sassy shook her head, thinking of the man in the black coat. “What will he do in the winter? Where’s he going to sleep?”
Marion raised one cynical eyebrow. “On park benches or in alleys, probably.”
As they did so often, Sassy’s thoughts went to Joey. “You said that some of those patients who are being let out of the hospital are veterans.”
“Yes. Of different conflicts. We even have men from the Great War with us.”
