Printer Friendly Page

DIGNITY AT LAST FOR ONE VETERAN -- At the Fort Logan

burial of a homeless veteran, government and mortuary

officials did their best to give the late Charles W. Bean the

semblance of normalcy in death that he couldn't find in life.

 

 

For more on homeless veterans, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/ses
search.php?q=homeless&op=and

Story here... http://test.
denverpost.com/news/ci_6674568

Story below:

-------------------------

Dignity at last for vet

By Michael Booth
Denver Post Staff Writer

What you noticed first were the things not there.

At the Fort Logan burial of a homeless veteran Monday, government and mortuary officials did their best to give the late Charles W. Bean the semblance of normalcy in death that he couldn't find in life.

But even at this sublimely beautiful lakeside chapel on a hilltop at impeccable Fort Logan National Cemetery, the disarray that must have defined Charles Bean's life was represented by a vacuum.

There were only six chairs in one row before Bean's copper-colored casket, and only two of those filled by people who knew his name. There were no family members that anyone could find. No photograph of the deceased on the program or propped atop the casket.

No words spoken aloud from anyone who knew anything about Bean, who died Aug. 8, a day after his 58th birthday.

There were taps, a friendly chaplain struggling to help his small audience make a connection, and a lingering sadness that a fresh breeze can't blow away.

There was, too, though, a pervasive dignity. Naval Petty Officer Carl Altervogt carefully tucked in the edges of the flag, folded into its all-too-familiar triangle. Altervogt on bended knee presented the flag to Bean's friend Matt, as Altervogt does up to 100 times a year as a traveling honor-guard reservist.

Altervogt remarked later that, after doing this hundreds and hundreds of times for gatherings big and small, Bean's service was the only veteran's funeral where he hadn't handed the flag to a family relation.

Another somber realization lingered in the late-summer air. Dignity comes with repetition.

Bean's funeral was the 485th service in seven years for a homeless veteran with no family to arrange a memorial. Five of those were performed locally by Olinger funeral homes, whose parent company, Service Corp. International, began donating these "dignity" services for full military burials of homeless
veterans who were honorably discharged.

Bean was a seaman apprentice for the Navy in the Vietnam era, circumstances unknown. He was discovered ill in Matt's apartment in Arvada and died at the hospital.

Veterans make up a disproportionately high share of the homeless across the nation, and it's no surprise to local veteran and volunteer Jim Rendon that Bean was among those troubled by his past.

Rendon once helped Bean seek military benefits but doesn't remember a lot of specifics - there are too many other vets to help in the meal line at St. Paul's Lutheran Church. Some of them knew Bean as a fellow wanderer, Rendon said, and would have liked to have attended the service. "I should have brought a bus,"

Rendon smiled ruefully.

A Colorado census last year estimated more than 16,000 people are living homeless. Some surveys put the percentage of the homeless who are veterans as high as 23 percent.

At least Bean had one friend, in Matt. Olinger's Stacie Schubert has been to dignity services where only the funeral-home staff were an audience.

Presiding chaplain Les Selker, who assisted Air Force fliers in the Vietnam War, acknowledged how that conflict cast a pall over so many. The B-52 pilots would land at their base with tears in their eyes, Selker said, knowing their bombing run had just wiped out a square mile of humanity.

"How do we reconcile a loving God and a suffering world?" Selker asked, to Bean's memory, and to Matt, bent over in the front row, and to the officials from Olinger and Fort Logan standing by to help. An answer was not immediately forthcoming. "Our part is to trust God," Selker finally said. "He's going to straighten it all out one day."

The bearers who came for Bean's casket afterward were employees of Fort Logan, keys and tools dangling from their belts in anticipation of a day of cemetery duties. Matt was crestfallen and didn't want to talk, and the casket went into a government working van painted black. It would be held elsewhere until Bean's grave was finished, and in the meantime, another group needed the open-air shelter by the lake to honor a different fallen veteran.

The TV and newspaper cameras were capped and packed. Bean's unremarked life had been transformed into a well-documented passing. In the end, someone noticed.

Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --