Trauma, romance and heartbreak. The past five years have been a roller coaster ride for Tammy Naylor and Emily Gray.
“We know what hopeless feels like,” Tammy said. “We know sorrow. Sorrow is unique unto itself. It is something so dark that it saps the life right out of your cells. You feel your life slipping away.”
“But we never thought of leaving each other,” Emily said. “She’s my heartbeat. She makes me a better person every day.”
“Perfect love,” Tammy said. “I didn’t know anything like this existed. I knew I could give it; I didn’t know I could receive it.”
When Emily and Tammy first got together, Emily lost her family.
“Her mother, father, sister, her best friend – they hurt her in ways you don’t know you can be hurt,” Tammy said.
“I was blindsided,” Emily said. “My family had been so close; it shocked me.”
Emily is originally from the Salem area, Tammy from Seattle. They came to Portland in search of a place to live.
“A friend of mine learned I was homeless,” Emily said. “He said he had a friend with a pool house he was willing to rent. So we went up to Troutdale.”
“Where the wind never stops,” Tammy added.
“We signed the contract,” Emily continued. “It said pool house, back yard, it sounded great.”
“Then we saw it,” she said. “Wow. Talk about non-disclosure. No water, heat or electricity. It was the middle of winter, and it had a guy living in it. The rent was $600.”
“It was freezing, and we had our cat, so we turned over the empty hot tub, put our mattress down, and that’s where we lived,” Emily said. “Thank God the guy living there turned out to be a kind soul. But then my paycheck was late, and we got kicked out. We never should have paid that much anyway. We got dropped off in Sandy with our belongings on the side of the road. We got a kid’s tent from Goodwill, but it was missing the poles, so we jerry-rigged the tent to a fence and a tree. Sitting in there with our cat, in the rain, we just cried. Where are we? Where do we go?”
“We wound up getting a better tent and moving out to 138th and Sandy behind a Costco with other homeless people,” Tammy said. “It was a bad winter. We almost had a suicide pact. We would just lie there in the dark, listening to the rain.”
“Both of us got terribly sick from rat droppings and mold,” Emily said. “We got toxic infections so bad we nearly died.”
They ended up calling separate ambulances, going to different hospitals and losing track of each other for nine days.
“I was in the ICU with a central line in my neck,” Emily said. “I had blood poisoning and lost 70 pounds. The worst part was I didn’t know if Tammy was dead or alive. I had the nurses calling the hospitals. I thought I’d lost her.”
When she was discharged, she walked back to their camp. Tammy was there; she had been discharged a half-hour earlier.
Then their luck turned.
“I was panhandling at Safeway on Glison, and God put it in me to ask this man if he knew of anyplace we could rent, and he said yes, he and his fiancée wanted to rent this little place in their backyard. He wanted to talk it over with her first, so we waited for a few days, and sure enough, he called,” Emily said.
“It was the cutest place, like a little house,” Tammy said. “The most comfortable bed we’ve ever known. Microwave, TV, coffee maker. And we got along well. We even planned to get married on the same day in a double wedding.”
And then, as Emily puts it, the famous other shoe dropped.
“Four thirty in the morning, he comes screaming at our door: ‘She’s gone!’” Emily recalled. “She’d died in her sleep. Forty-eight years old. She was supposed to have surgery the next week. He was destroyed. He became severely depressed. We had to feed him, get him out of bed, take care of his cats. Eventually her daughters sold the house, so we were back on the streets.”
“We’d been there a year,” Tammy said. “After that, we met somebody renting a room on Craigslist, but he was a predator. When Emily wouldn’t have sex with him, he kicked us out and kept everything we owned.”
After several more bad experiences, they ended up in the Willamette Center couple’s shelter. They’ve been there 11 months.
“They love us there,” Tammy said. “We get along with all 153 people there.”
Six months ago, they found Street Roots.
“We went through orientation, got the first 10 papers, and I made $30 in two hours!” Tammy said. “We went out for dinner that night. We’ve been eating better.
“Street Roots is amazing,” she said. “It takes people who are in the ditch and don’t have love or interactions with others and makes them feel part of the human race again. It brings them out of their shell, and you feel hope again. I haven’t felt hope in so long. I forgot what it felt like, like I belong and I deserve my place here. I look around at people who don’t have Street Roots –”
“The sadness is palpable,” Emily interjected. “Street Roots creates its own community.”
“The customers aren’t spitting on you because you are wearing a backpack; they interact with you because you have a job; they see your humanity,” Tammy said.
“And I love the paper. It’s a good paper,” Emily said.
Emily and Tammy plan on getting married as soon as they have a home, as a symbol of celebration and completion. They will take the last name Kaddesh, which means “sanctified, sacred” in Hebrew.
“I can’t marry her until I can carry her over the threshold of our home,” Tammy said.
“It’s simple,” she continued. “All we need is a home. We did all the paperwork and interviews, but we got lost in the computer system for six months. Now we have to do it all again. Other than that, my life is perfect. I want nothing but to give back because I’m grateful, even joy and contentment can be heavy if you don’t give it away. Everyone has a story, a heartbreaking one. We are all broken. But I wouldn’t give up what we’ve experienced. I’d do every step again.”
“Even with the abuse, the rage – there’s fulfillment in the humbling, the good people, the conversations,” Emily added.
“Walking in the ditches, we’ve learned that people are innately beautiful. Those with the least give the most, those who look the most jaded, the hardest, have the softest hearts,” Tammy said. “For a while, it felt like we were the only people who were willing to give until it hurt. But that’s not true. People are amazing.”
Emily told the story of a day she and Tammy were collecting cans along Sandy Boulevard. They took the cans to the Safeway at Southeast 68th Avenue, but the machines were broken.
“We were so tired,” Emily said. “I said to Tammy, ‘I’m going to get us a ride.’ So I went over and asked this guy in a truck to take us over to QFC to turn in some cans, and he says sure, get in. On the way, we tell our story. When we get out of the truck, he hands us a wad of money: $400! It changed our entire life, and I’ve got lots of those stories. Every time you get down –”
“God shows us somebody beautiful,” Tammy said.
“I’m not even close to where I want to be when I leave here,” Tammy said. “What a privilege it is to be alive. There’s a light inside of us, we are all part of God. We may be bare-boned and naked at the end of this trip, but we are going to be amazing.”