I Found My Brother
Vancouver’s skid row is actually a beautiful place. Like many of the skid rows in the United States, it’s gentrifying and transitioning into art districts and lofts. It always mingled with the tourist district close by on the port and has some of the most beautiful historic buildings in all of Canada. At night on its sidewalks, stories are woven as lost people find a place to live and die.
I didn’t see my brother Frankie much after our hippie days were over. I moved to Southern California, married, had a baby, and got a job. I only took quick trips back to Santa Rosa, usually for a celebration or a funeral. Frank became a wanderer, a traveling storyteller, who in between journeys lived with our mother.
I’m sure my mom knew Frank had mental illness. My paternal grandmother had schizophrenia and mom cared for her in her older years. But like so many families then we didn’t talk about it. Of my grandmother, she only said, “She was jolly but different.” Of mental illness, I knew nothing.
In 1986, Mom died unexpectedly. Frankie was wandering. I couldn’t track him down until after she was buried, and her small rural property was sold. Frank didn’t want me to wire him his money; he said he would come get it personally. When I picked him up at the airport, he said, “Quick, duck into the elevator. The CIA is following us.” No one was there. As he pulled me through the closing of the door, I realized this was not a spoof. Frankie really believed he was being tailed. At the bank, he regaled the manager with fantastical stories of his escapades during the Brazilian banking crisis while simultaneously stuffing $25,000 cash into his pockets and crocodile boots.
In 1993, OBRA overhauled a Medicaid law and authorized relatives and courts to place inheritances and settlements into a special needs trust to protect their benefits and cover their supplemental needs. Proxy Parent Foundation was formed to provide the added benefit of providing experienced personal support specialists to work directly with its beneficiaries with mental illness. In 1986, however, Mom only had me to answer her question “Who will care when I’m not there?”
I received a few collect calls from Frankie after that and an occasional letter postmarked here or there. One included a hand-drawn map to a treasure he said he had buried should I ever need it. Then, he called from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He said he had a lead on a good dump truck in Kitchener, Ontario. Would I lend him enough to get there? No calls came in for a couple of years. Then the silence was broken with a call from a private detective in Pennsylvania. A dump truck really was involved in Frank’s story but not the one in Kitchener, Ont. He had been hit by one several years previously when he was in that state. The insurance company wanted to settle but Frank couldn’t be found. I went to court and got an order to settle on his behalf. A few years later, when Frank made contact again, I sent him his money.
In 2006, Proxy Parent Foundation formed the PLAN (Planned Lifetime Assistance Network) of California Master Pooled Trust. It can accept settlements and windfalls. Had it been available for the dump truck settlement when Frank got his settlement, its knowledgeable and professional management would have disbursed it for his special needs.
His calls became fewer and fewer. I searched through the silence. This past year I located him. His cremated remains laid in Vancouver pauper’s field, one of many who had died on the streets, unclaimed. I put a plaque on his grave. It says, “Frank Henry Rowlin, 1945-2008, Found”