The caravan winds through the snow-blanketed cemetery in a small, hushed procession. Snow falls in tiny, sporadic flakes. The weather seems appropriate, the father remarked earlier. He would be burying his daughter in a few hours. “Snow to match the storm inside us.”
At the gravesite, the family stands in a semicircle, and the pastor reads from the Bible. He speaks of the day when souls will be reunited under the eyes of God. “This body will rest in hope.” He asks God to let his countenance shine upon Andrea Jordan Scherer, to give her peace. It is understood, had long been understood, Andrea was a soul full of restlessness.
Her mother and sister weep. Her father kisses his fingers and presses them to the box holding her ashes. They each lay a rose upon it, and the blooms are deep red against the white of the snow. Andrea’s brother slips a single cigarette amid the roses, and for a moment, the family laughs.
When it is time to leave, Andrea’s father drops to his knees beside the grave, and, carefully lowering the box of ashes, he and the cemetery superintendent lay Andrea to rest.
You may have seen Andrea downtown. Perhaps on the 16th Street Mall. She would have been wearing a bandanna and glasses. Fair skin, shy smile, jeans and sweat shirt. She might have asked you for change. She would not have been surprised if you said no or if you walked by her as if she weren’t there, if you yelled at her to get a job.
But she might write a poem about it. She might say: “Hardened by the years swirls making masks/to cover what lies beneath the obvious/never to be known by the beauty within.”
On the street, in poetry workshops, she called herself Rinu. Renew. A hopeful name for a young person accustomed to periodic slides into hopelessness. Bipolar disorder was the diagnosis, but her parents, Lynne and Shea, knew when she was just a little girl, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing in her crib, destroying one mattress, then another, that something was askew, out of balance.
“All in all, I’m an odd one,” Andrea wrote about herself. “I have a huge heart and try to reach out if anybody needs a helping hand whether it be a friend or a complete stranger. I can be very devious, and my past isn’t one of much happiness, but I’ve moved past it.”
By the time she was 18, her parents say, she had left their Douglas County home and was living on and off the streets, in and out of trouble. She hung around with other Denver street kids. No glamour exists in this life. These were years of anguish, of her parents driving through the city on cold nights looking for her, of a thousand conversations starting with the word “why.”
“We adopted her and her brother out of foster care,” Shea says. “We wanted to give them better lives.”
“I’m an odd duck, Dad,” he remembers Andrea once saying. “On the street, they accept me for who I am.”
Later, when she began performing her poetry, she would tell her mom: “I have to write for these kids on the street. No one will listen to them.”
Andrea would have turned 21 on Jan. 30. She’d joined the Art from Ashes therapeutic poetry workshops at the Spot. She’d moved off the streets and was living in transition housing. She’d been arrested for breaking and entering and ended up in the Court to Community program, a special docket for municipal lawbreakers with mental illness. Every week, she appeared in court with a new poem, which she read aloud to the judge. She’d started taking her medications regularly again.
In the week before her birthday, Andrea was assaulted in an alley. She reported the crime the next day. Three days later, police found her body in her apartment. The preliminary investigation points to suicide. “We don’t know what happened,” her father says. “We just don’t know.”
Andrea was a street kid, and because of that, some of you will assign her life less value. But that is not all she was. Something about her spoke to many people, and 200 of them attended her public memorial service last week, including the judge to whom she read her new poems. The young people of Art from Ashes held their own poetry tribute.
While the Scherers were picking up a few things from their daughter’s apartment, they got a call from the building manager, saying some of her friends were in the lobby. That was followed by a second call saying more had arrived. When the couple went downstairs, these young people were carrying a poster bearing their daughter’s picture. Andrea’s friends led their own procession to Andrea’s favorite spot on the river. They lit candles and told stories, and when they were finished, they dropped the lit candles into the water.
It would be too pat to say that in that moment, Lynne and Shea understood their daughter and the choices she made, but it is accurate to say they understood better. Andrea had two families, and both loved her.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
