A good friend of mine passed away last week and I want to tell you about him.  

I met Ronnie Evans in his nursing home room about seven years ago.  My secretary had taken his call about some or other legal claim he thought he had and asked me to go see him.  I didn't want to.  I had no special skills or interest in nursing home law and it didn't sound like he had a case in the first place.  But she said I should go anyway.  In fact, she insisted.  And so I went.

When I walked into Eastview Nursing Home, it was the second time in my life I had been inside such a place.  Back then, I would have called that lucky.  Not so, now.  When I got past the smell of urine and the dimness of the lights, the sallow bleakness of what light there was and the narrowness of the halls, I saw Ronnie for the first time and was officially out of my comfort zone.  He lay belly down in a wheel chair which was opened flat.  He had no legs.  His arms were constricted up under his torso.  That's really all he was physically - a head and torso.  If that description sounds stark, it is.  And that is what I saw that first day.  That is what I perceived.   How utterly small I was. 

I can't remember what words were said first or by whom.  But I was immediately struck by this man.  He was upset but not emotional.  He knew what he wanted, knew why he called me and began to describe his problem to me.  He did not tell me about his condition or how he came to it.  He was upset at being kicked out of the last nursing home he had lived in.  I struggled to listen to his story as I tried to wrap my mind around him and his plight.  He was completely, physically helpless.  Dependent.  Yet, he was young.  And he was obviously smart.  Way smart. 

I had planned to be there 15 minutes.  After an hour, I was still there.  After an hour and a half too. He engaged me.  And engaging is the word.  He had been kicked out for complaining about the prior home's failure to provide dignified care to himself and others.  How did they do it?  They simply loaded him onto a gurney.  Pushed the gurney into the back of a waiting ambulance and threw his few belongings in a plastic wal-mart bag behind him.  The ambulance took him to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital where the doctors promptly saw that Ronnie was saner than you or I and attempted to discharge him.  By then, he was out.  Never to return.  Another home accepted him and there he was.   I told Ronnie I didn't think he had a case but that I would be back.  I decided on the way out the door I was going to be this man's friend, lawsuit or no lawsuit.   I later convinced him to drop it and move on.

We got to be friends and I learned that 25 years earlier, Ronnie had been a passenger in a van involved in a five car pile up caused by Governor George Wallace's neice.  He was left a quadreplegic. He had hired a lawyer and received a large settlement.  Which he promptly blew. I know little of the real details but it sounded like he gave a lot of money to a lot pf people to simply take him from place to place blowing money on wine, women and song.  It did not help that he was an alcoholic.   He later lost his legs to gangrene.

Through all this, his young wife stayed by him with their toddler son.  One day, while Ronnie was sitting in his wheelchair on their porch in a drunken stooper, she was working on the engine of their car.  The car was pointing down the hill of their drive way with another car parked just in front of it down the drive.  The young boy got into the cab of the truck she was been working on and somehow put it into gear.  It moved forward and crushed her between the two vehicles.  She died there as Ronnie watched.  Helpless and beyond help.  It was the last day he ever had a drop of alcohol.

Ronnie later lived with whoever would take him.  Friends.  Friends of friends.  Some good.  Some not so good.  One day, the Alabama Department of Human Resources showed up.  The agent saw his condition, the drug addled people he was with and the squalor of his life.  DHR placed him into Adult Protective Custody against his will and Ronnie's life of blowing from nursing home to nursing home was in motion.  Everywhere he went, he challenged the system, shouted when he saw neglect and was eventually displaced.  He could think and speak and make noise in the system.  He was smarter than most of the able bodied men who owned the homes he lived in.  And he didn't fit in.  He was simply not what the system had in mind.

He ended up in the place where I met him and ultimately, at the end of the road, the county home.  After a year of visiting him off and on, I saw that his court appointed guardian was too busy and apathetic to do much for him so I volunteered.  Ronnie could be a pain in the ass and I will never forget the disbelief of the lawyer when I told him I would get the court to appoint me to take his place.  He thought I was crazy.

As the years went on, I really got to know Ronnie.  He was a card.  He never got out of the facility, so I started taking him to the movies once a month or so.  Started acknowledging his birthday and other holidays with him.  He would always ask about my family and I sensed he almost pretended he knew them.  "Tell Ann and the girls I love them" he would say when I would leave.  I think he wanted the staff to know he had someone out there.  One day, my wife said what I had been thinking about.  "Why don't you bring him home one day for a visit?"   For the next three years, Ronnie was a guest at our home every Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We spent more and more time visiting, going to movies, shooting the bull. I fed him, held his cigarettes for him and gave him grief in between.   

I had thought I had nothing in common with a 50 something year old quadriplegic black man who would just as soon watch a terrible martial arts movie as pay half a second's attention to a sporting event or a book.   His condition aside, we literally came from different worlds.  He had been poor and come from the working ghettos of Lumberton, North Carolina and North Birmingham.  I was a white lawyer with a fancy car.  The staff of the home never could figure us out.  We were like two oddball cops stuck on a beat together, griping and laughing at each other the whole way.

When the county home administrator fraudulently tried to kick Ronnie out by filing papers to have him committed, we sued him for malicious prosecution and won.  Ronnie got an eighty thousand dollar jury verdict and for once, for once, he stood on equal ground.  For once, someone listened to him.  They appealed with no grounds rather than face paying him and owning up to their actions, but it hardly mattered.  We were over the moon. 

This past Thanksgiving, Ronnie actually spent the night with us.  I was apprehensive but it was great.  The next morning, we watched Iron Man on my plasma and I cooked us both eggs and bacon.  It was another step.

My kids learned so much from Ronnie.  They are unfazed by disablities and see only the human being. I am eternally grateful for that.  It's a gift I received from him too.

Two weeks ago, Ronnie was admitted to the hospital when his blood pressure dropped significantly.  After two days, they sent him home and I was relieved.  After all, he had not been sick.  Two hours after he got home, he had to go back.  The next morning, I got a call that he was dead.  I still cannot believe the words when I type them. 

For all his physical helplessness, Ronnie Evans was a lion of a man.  I loved him and miss him.

The title of this post is deficient, of course.  You can't do a life justice with a pen.

The next post will be something I wrote to read at his memorial service.  I guess I am posting all this here because I want people to know about this man, Ronnie Evans.  Ronnie's family, if they are still alive, abandoned him long ago, so there are precious few people to call.  Almost none.  He is being buried in a pauper's grave tomorrow morning but he left me richer than I can explain.  You never met Ronnie but I want you to read this and remember him with me. 

May he rest in peace.