A local neighbor & artist, Barbara lived a street over. Her tale is a humanitarian one, that chronicles the best in community and the nobility of neighbors.

I present this writing with some shame, as I, too, was a neighbor, 20 years younger than Barbara's well lived life. I allowed a distance, as one can do, which never got traversed, into a knowing of what all she had gleaned from her travels, her artist journey and her grand expressions of creativity. For this I am regretful.

When my wife & I returned from Washington this past summer, we learned of the heroic acts of beauty, as neighbors were cobbled-together to step-up and step-into some heavy-lifting. Barbara, now an elderly woman living alone, whose long comet trail of fascinations had gathered many skills and identities, but somehow had never fully left the England that she loved. She was an anthropologist, a seeker, an artist, an adventurer and a collector. But now she was sinking faster than most realized, moving across the landscape of eccentricity into an actual risk of living alone. Barbara had no family, so her shadow of life was not cast onto others, except her neighbors who saw her lights flickering.

She had an illustrious life, becoming a world-class citizen of the arts, including the memorabilia of three marriages stuffed into a house resembling more of a storage-unit for some welter-weight museum. Her neighbors noticed the slippage becoming more and more profound. Thirty bags of un-opened mail, were discovered. Services were being shut-off, and her mortgage payments were going unpaid for months. Her neighbors did not look away, they saw the slippage from the stench that old age yields. These neighbors, each with their own talents, capabilities and desires as well as their own lives, chose to follow a pathway within us all, which we simply call our humanitarianism. They literally rolled-up their sleeves and righted her ship while preserving this old woman's legacy.

Team Shawcroft, had been unofficially assembled to assess, to advocate, and to act, governed by humility which they did for many long months, in fact for four enduring years!

Holding Barbara afloat, took on many facets from many hands, most notably her confusions and her growing inability to attend to the rigors of daily life. Her Team was not dissuaded from her growing cantankerous flare-ups, nor even her accusations, which included stealing her Meals-on-Wheels, which some neighbors recognized and held for her, as she would sleep late into the afternoon, often missing these food deliveries.

Taking Barbara grocery shopping, became nothing less than an ordeal. An activity that she would stretch into an a half-day marathon, parading up and down the foods isles, befriending old jars and cans that she seemed perhaps to recognize. However, as the years grew her into her nineties, it was more apparent that she would need around the clock care, and a local Memory Care unit became the next goal the Team would need to address.

Barbara fought the notion of leaving her home. Frightened too of what would become of all that was familiar. Her home and her memories in her rooms were like navigational stars, as art and objects seemed to sustain aspects of her past as well as her mercurial present.

But her Team was well on it. They had been honoring her possessions, categorizing, filing, photographing and documenting all that the house, her museum held. Perhaps they took-on Barbara's anthropological scientific trainings, as they seemed to know they were holding her life in their very hands.

Helping her to overcome her terror, to leave her home and her possessions, became a serious threshold to cross. As her home held her children, (her art, her textiles, and well travelled collectibles). She desperately feared these would be seen as meaningless objects, abandoned and disguarded.

But the collective will and loving determination of her Team finally won out, as Barbara was eventually able to trust a few friendly and daily faces that she had taken-in and grown reliant upon. Slowly in dedicated fashion, precious items were sold to very good homes.

One neighbor even paid her $68,000 unpaid mortgage, thereby preventing certain foreclosure of her home. The Team knew her property would be the only resource to support her living in a memory-care unit.

Barbara allowed from the remarkable trust that was shown her, a way that she could leave. She now lives and is thankful to no longer be in the maelstrom of destitution. Her neighbors continue to visit her and they were successful in creating profitable sales of her many books and memorabilia that flowed into her trust.

Perhaps, as I interviewed these remarkable soldiers-of-service, they demonstrated their turn to hold-the-hope, like the guns in Europe that fell silent once and for all on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month. May our Armistice of civility, dignity and regard for life, never be lost.

Blessing to Barbara and Blessings to her Team of devoted neighbors.

There were many more people who helped with the three garage-sales and the endless runs to the dump runs that are not listed.

P. Gregory Guss
November 2021