A deep sense of community, shared vulnerability in West Broadway

Opinion

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This article was published 27/11/2023 (679 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Now.”

A long pause.

“Now.”

The paramedic on the phone has told me to count the seconds between the breaths of the woman lying on the sidewalk. Eight. Nine. Ten seconds.

“Now.”

She is young, maybe 20 or 22, and it’s a warm summer Saturday morning. I’d been on my way to the corner store at Sherbrook and Westminster to buy a Free Press. Her legs are bent at a weird angle and her eyes are closed.

A friend had been bent over her, going through her pockets, trying to find out what substance she had taken. She told me, “She’s OK, I think it’s fentanyl but she’ll be OK. I called her dad and he’s going to come.”

But I could tell by her colour and her breathing that she was most definitely not going to be OK, and that she was going to need more than her dad for help. So I was on the line with paramedics. And I was afraid. I was afraid that as I counted the seconds between her breaths, and as those silences became longer, that at some point I was going to just keep counting, higher and higher, waiting for a breath that would not come.

Thankfully, the ambulance arrived quickly, and I was dismissed by the paramedics.

West Broadway is a neighbourhood where lives are lived outside, where people walk to buy their groceries, their case of beer, their coffee or the newspaper.

It’s a jarring feeling, to go from someone’s lifeline — praying for their life, keeping calm and trying to assist — to simply being alone on a West Broadway street corner, trying to remember what brought me there in the first place.

Ah, yes. The paper.

I walked the short distance to the corner store, pushed open the door, and found myself suddenly in tears just steps inside. Shaking, I explained what had just happened.

Scott and Jen were behind the counter that morning. These are people who have been in our lives for more than a decade. They’ve warmly greeted my children through endless Slurpee runs, first in strollers, now on rollerblades. We congratulated Scott when his granddaughter was born, and we get to hear how she’s doing when we visit.

For 30 minutes, Scott and Jen helped me talk through my panic and helplessness. That morning, having a strong community saved more than one of us.

West Broadway is a neighbourhood where lives are lived outside, where people walk to buy their groceries, their case of beer, their coffee or the newspaper.

It’s a neighbourhood with porches and balconies, a place where homes are physically close together and lives are lived in sight, and earshot, and relation with other lives.

West Broadway is a place where the folks working at the diner wave to you as they walk home from work, where the owner of the Indian buffet slipped $20 in my baby’s car seat “for his education” because I had satisfied all my cravings for Indian food there while pregnant with him.

It’s a place where folks at the grocery store and the corner store know you by name.

And it’s a place where we know we are vulnerable. I suspect it is some of that knowledge of shared vulnerability that brings us together.

We know some of us are troubled and struggling, and we are not immune to having the struggles of others impact our own lives. But we have each others’ backs, and we try to respond in time.

In a thriving and interconnected neighbourhood like mine, we have no space to turn away from our neighbours.

It’s easy to condemn people who live at certain addresses, in certain neighbourhoods. It makes it possible to remove ourselves from the ecosystem of our city, and thereby dismiss the struggles of others as some kind of choice they’ve made, some deserved and inevitable destiny, some incredibly obvious incongruity with an established order that makes this type of event predictable.

But in a thriving and interconnected neighbourhood like mine, we have no space to turn away from our neighbours. We must act with compassion and curiosity, and an ever-present awareness that we may be called upon to help.

My neighbourhood experienced a tragedy early Sunday morning. Four people are dead after a shooting at a house my kids walk past to get to the park. Four neighbours have gone and one is fighting for life.

I know that many of us here in the small West Broadway neighbourhood will know their names and faces. And I have a faith borne by experience that our neighbourhood will come together in respect and mourning and compassion.

Compassion not only for the victims and families, but for the collective wound in our community, for the grief of a lost sense of safety that will take time and effort to recover.

While I stand, shaking, just inside the entryway of this moment, I have every reason to believe the next breath will come.

My neighbourhood is strong, and with the right care, will recover.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca