Sometimes we hear or read of an individual’s story where they were able to succeed against impossible odds. This is one of those stories proving nothing is impossible.
On December 26, 1996, she borrowed money for a cab ride to Potter’s Field Cemetery in New York City. She had no money for a proper funeral. Her mother’s coffin was a donated pine box where someone had written her name with a black marker; unfortunately, they misspelled it. The girl was sixteen years old. She stood at the graveside in the cold and made herself a promise. In her coat pocket she kept a crumpled photograph of her mother at just seventeen years of age; a young, bright-eyed, full of whatever a person is full of before the world takes it from them. This girl was going to make sure her life looked nothing like her mother’s.
She was born in the Bronx in 1980 to two people who loved her but could not take care of her. Her parents were cocaine and heroin addicts. Her mother Jean was legally blind from a degenerative eye condition she’d had since birth, which entitled her to a monthly welfare check. The first of the month was the most important day in this family’s household with plenty of food and an apartment. But by the fifth day of every month, the the money was gone. So for the rest of the month, she and her sister ate egg and mayonnaise sandwiches. When they were out of eggs they ate ice cubes.
She remembered watching her parents shoot up heroin in the kitchen. They didn’t hide it. Her mother would save the last of a birthday gift — money sent in a card from her grandmother — and then stealing it to buy drugs. Her mother would beg for the daughter’s forgiveness and she always did.
At eleven years old, her mother sat her down and told her she had AIDS. The family split over the years that followed. She would bounce between her father’s apartment, her grandfather’s house, a group home, and the street. She stopped going to school — partly because the chaos made it impossible, partly because she was ashamed of her unwashed clothes and the smell that came with them. The other kids at school were cruel about it, so it was easier not to go.
By fifteen, everything collapsed. Her father could no longer pay rent, so he moved into a homeless shelter. Her mother was dying, finally succumbing to aids three weeks later at Christmas. The girl had nowhere to go.
This young girl learned the rhythms of surviving without a home. Subway stations were warmest on the cold nights. She slept in apartment building hallways, on friends’ floors when someone would have her, in parks when no one would. She ate whatever she could find. She always kept going.
Somewhere inside her, through all of it, something was working out the problem. She would later say, “I connected the lifestyles that I had witnessed every day with how my mother ended up. And if there was anything I could do about it, that would not happen to me.” So she went looking for a school.
Reaching into her pocket one day, she found she had exactly enough money for either a subway token to a school interview or a slice of pizza. Although she was hungry, she bought the token.
The man on the other side of the desk was the founder of the Humanities Preparatory Academy in Manhattan. He listened to her story. He gave her a place. The school never knew she was homeless. She hid it well arriving early every day, never missing class, doing her homework in subway stations and stairwells and anywhere else she could find light and a flat surface. She loved learning with an intensity that surprised even her. The classroom was the one place in her frantic life that made complete sense. She completed four years of high school in two. She graduated with a 95 average, first in her class of 158.
Her teacher took a group of top students on a trip to Boston. She walked onto the campus of Harvard University and felt something she couldn’t name. Her teacher looked at her and said: “It’s a reach, but it’s not impossible.”
She found the New York Times scholarship — twelve thousand dollars a year for students who had overcome obstacles to thrive academically. The application required her to write about those obstacles. For the first time, she told the full truth. Her essay described what her life had actually been.
The morning it was published in the New York Times, she arrived at school and found the lobby full of people – strangers, teachers and other students and people from the neighborhood who had read the story. They had never met each other. Someone had food. Someone had money. Someone offered her a place to stay. From that day, she never slept rough again. She was one of six students out of three thousand who applied who were awarded the Times scholarship that year. Harvard admitted her in the class of 2000.
College was not the end of the story. Three years in, her father, now sober, was dying of AIDS. She left Harvard to care for him. She sat with him through his illness until death in 2006. She then went back and finished her degree in 2009.
She built a career as a speaker and counsellor, working with at-risk youth, advocating for homeless teenagers, naming her organization The Arthur Project. She has spoken at events alongside world leaders. Her memoir Breaking Night became a New York Times bestseller, published in twelve languages. A Lifetime movie about her life received three Emmy nominations.
Amazingly, she never blamed her parents. She said they were good people who had a disease that was stronger than they were. She kept the crumpled photograph of her mother at seventeen — before it all went wrong — in her pocket for years.
She was homeless at fifteen. She got into Harvard at eighteen. She did her homework on the subway. Her name is Liz Murray. She proves nothing is impossible.
There are many we come in contact with that have powerful stories of overcoming and beating the odds. Jesus talks about many in the scriptures who made a 180 degree turnaround because Jesus provides hope to the hopeless.
Psalm 40:1-3: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him.”
Tagged: addiction and recovery, heroes, homelessness, mothers, parenting
