Remembering must be more than recall

Homeless Persons' Memorial Day reflections from Chief Behavioral Health Office Lawanda Williams, LCSW-C

Today, we gather to remember. We speak the names of people who died while experiencing homelessness. We pause. We grieve. We honor. But today, remembering must be more than recall. It must be re-membering.

To re-member is to restore what has been torn apart. It is to return people to our care. To say “You belong and you always have.” Homelessness does not strip a person of their membership in our shared humanity, even though our systems often act as if it does. Our policies, procedures, and practices can quietly communicate who counts, who is credible, and who is considered disposable. And when we fail to re-member people through our actions, we don’t just exclude them. We fracture the community we claim to serve.

There is a hard truth here. When we decide not to re-member others, our own membership is put at risk. A society that can look away from suffering learns how to numb itself. A community that denies belonging to some eventually hollows out belonging for all.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called us toward the vision of the Beloved Community, a community rooted not in charity but in justice; not in distance, but in deep connection; not in exclusion, but in radical belonging. The Beloved Community is not built by remembering people only after they are gone. It is built when we insist on their dignity while they are still here. It is built when housing is not a reward for compliance, when care is not conditional, and when love shows up as policy, funding, and follow-through.

Community care asks something of us. It asks us to slow down, to see people fully, to design systems that heal rather than harden. It asks us to ask different questions. We should not ask “Why don’t they fit?” but “Why did we build something that excludes?”

Today, as we remember those we have lost, let us also recommit to the work of re-membering the living. To returning people to community, to safety, to home. To choosing practices that affirm life, and policies that protect possibility. Because the measure of our community is not how we memorialize the dead, but how fiercely we fight for the living.

May we remember. May we re-member. And may we continue building a Beloved Community where no one is left outside the circle of care.

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