FINDING A HOME: Elizabeth Goodhue: When families resort to tough love

Elizabeth Goodhue

Elizabeth Goodhue COURTESY PHOTO

Published: 01-29-2025 11:01 AM

Debrina Kawam’s death haunts me. Not because Sebastion Zapata was too drunk to remember what he had done, or that anyone could do something so depraved is unconscionable. But because Debrina was someone's sister, friend and daughter who died homeless and alone.

“None of Kawam's relatives attended the service, but they wanted people to know that they do not consider her to have been homeless. She has been with her family for the duration of her life. They were helping her... and wanted to show tough love, to move forward to help her,” reported CBS News. Horrific, traumatizing, chilling, harrowing – words cycled through the news and then, like Debrina, disappeared.

Someone who doesn’t have a sibling with mental illness, addiction or both might think Debrina’s family’s denial of her homelessness and their tough love was harsh. But if her family was anything like ours, they had reached the end of their rope. I, too, had a sibling who died homeless. His name was Peter. Our family had a funeral for him. Few people showed up – a cousin or two, my siblings and parents and our next-door neighbors who, like brothers, grew up with us skiing, sledding, skating, racing minibikes, swimming, building forts, and playing kick the can in our pajamas at twilight. A picture of our gang sitting on top of a dirt pile includes Peter standing tall in his cowboy boots, spurs and a cap gun set in a holster slipping off his hips like John Wayne.

But then we went to school, leaving our adventures for vacations, and occasional weekends. We met new friends. Our neighbor brothers went to one private day school while we went to another. That was when Peter became an outlier sent to another school, and another, and another.

Peter lived at home sometimes. Other times, he lived in places my parents thought would fix him. He crashed cars, drank, smoked, got hurt and kicked out of schools. Once, we returned home to the aftermath of a party he had while we were away. We found my Patty PayPal’s dismembered body parts in the freezer, disheveled sheets on our beds, toys strewn about, dishes broken and Peter had stitches in his knee from kicking in a glass door.

I continued living with my different brother while my two older siblings left for boarding school and college. Once, Peter overdosed on pills on the bus I rode with him that morning because the guys in the back dared him to do it. I didn’t know because the bus dropped off junior high students before the high-schoolers. In retrospect, I recall those boys bullying him into thinking they were his friends and manipulating him into saying and doing things. After that, when Peter and I headed to the bus stop together, he just kept walking down our dirt road toward town.

My other siblings and I graduated from high school, went to college and had careers and families of our own. Peter remained addicted to alcohol and drugs, and continued his trajectory of arrests, accidents, injuries, drugs and evictions. He drifted in and out of our lives, but when I saw him, I barely recognized him as my brother.

Once, in Peter’s adult life, my parents’ friend hired him to deliver the interoffice mail at his insurance company. Peter held this job for seven years. A married couple his age genuinely befriended him and rented an apartment they owned to him. Then, a generous aunt gave each of us $30,000. We hesitated before giving the money to Peter, but he was doing so well.

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It took him a week to spend the $30,000. He quit his job, bought a car, people he thought were his friends took advantage of him. Peter abandoned people who cared about him. Sometimes he disappeared. Other times, he only resurfaced to ask us to bail him out or give him money for rehab to dodge serving time. This pattern continued for years.

He moved in with people who lived off the system, used heroin and used Peter. Thinking we were a faucet of funds, they demanded money from us to fix something in the house, or to fix up their hot dog truck. When we refused them, they called us out for our cold-hearted neglect of our brother. When one of them called asking us to post bond for Peter, who had been arrested for possession of heroin, we used tough love. Peter spent the next seven years in jail. He blamed us for not giving him money for his bipolar meds, saying that was why he turned to heroin. We were used to shouldering the blame, perhaps because we could not prevent his demise.

It wasn’t until Peter’s parole officer called me that the gaps in my life concerning Peter made sense. He asked me to verify Peter’s unbelievable story about his childhood – how he grew up in Westchester County addicted to alcohol by the time he was 10, how he used to hitchhike to a friend’s house to do drugs instead of school, how he set fire to the curtains at boarding school, how he stole and lived in halfway houses.

The mysterious fog around my brother, the things he did and their consequences lifted. When I confirmed Peter’s story, the parole officer said he felt for our family. He validated that years of living with an addict – the lies, blame and anger – must have taken its toll on our family.

After his release, Peter went back to the people he had been living with. He was arrested again, and to dodge prison, he went to rehab. Days, maybe weeks later, Peter had a massive heart attack and died.

People like my brother Peter and Debrina Kawam die alone every day. They have parents and siblings like me and my brother and sisters trying to help. In the end, they resorted to tough love because we didn’t know what else to do.

Elizabeth Goodhue serves on the board of the Monadnock Area Transitional Shelter, which provides transitional housing, support and referral services to people who are experiencing homelessness, to educate the community on issues of homelessness and to advocate for solutions.