Tacoma memorial honors 32 homeless who died throughout county
“Did they love someone? Were they loved?”
On Sunday night at Shiloh Baptist Church, Chaplain Ed Jacobs asked these questions while memorializing 32 homeless people who died in Pierce County from March to May.
“We will never know what they did during their lives before their deaths, their stories and dreams are lost to each of us,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs has led a quarterly memorial service for homeless people who have recently died in the county since 2021. But Sunday’s service was “special,” according to Jacobs, as it was the first service after the WA Department of Health announced earlier this year that they would make improvements to how they collect data on homeless deaths. The change now allows death records with the DOH to include “information on homelessness status at the time of death.” This new classification is meant to accurately convey statistics to policy-makers and the community alike. Jacobs expressed hope during the service that more states in the U.S. would improve their data collection methods for homeless deaths.
Prior to the service, Jacobs requested figures from both the Pierce County Medical Examiner and the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, which included the names, ages, and date of death for those who passed.
Jacobs tasked attendees to care for homeless people, while they are still alive.
“For our 32 brothers and sisters, we celebrate their freedom from living rough on the streets. Freedom from searching for food every day, from being swept and forced to continually move,” Jacobs said. “... Freedom from us, trying to help them and not listening.”
At Sunday’s service, each attendee was gifted with a magnet and a slip of paper with one of the 32 names to add to their own refrigerators. Jacobs got this idea a year and a half ago, while working in his role as a fire chaplain at West Pierce Fire and Rescue. While counseling a grieving family who had just lost their grandfather, Jacobs noticed a mosaic of memorabilia on their refrigerator. Pictures of loved ones and elementary school artwork, reminding the family of the important people and moments in their lives, covered the refrigerator. This image became a symbol to Jacobs of the potential to expand one’s empathy.
“I was trying to figure out how to get people to recognize that the homeless people that died are really part of their family,” Jacobs told The News Tribune.
During the service, church volunteers read the names of those who had passed away. Attendees rose one-by-one as the name on their slip was said aloud. A moment of silence followed after every person in the room stood. Jacobs stated that he created this part of the service for an assignment in a course at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. The assignment tasked students to gather people for the sake of remembrance. He graduated this past month with a masters in theology and culture with an interdisciplinary emphasis in psychology.
The sermon moved Tacoma resident Hazel Pritchard to tears. She has attended Jacobs’ services twice now. For the past four years, Pritchard has volunteered at the Tacoma Rescue Mission where she said she’s gotten to know people in the homeless community by name. Sometimes she notices certain people missing from the shelter. She asks questions, often to no avail. At the services, she makes sure to check if she recognizes any names. This Sunday, nobody she knew was on the list.
“If I was in their shoes, I would want someone to celebrate (my life). We cannot judge what they do because we don’t know their story,” Pritchard said. “I don’t know their story, but just knowing they were living a life, they’re God’s children.”
Then, after a brief pause, she said: “They’re human beings and their lives matter too.”
Those who want to see the service and name-reading ceremony can watch the live stream on the church’s YouTube channel.
