Walter Strand’s income in the year he died was a Social Security payment of about fourteen hundred dollars a month, most of which went to the shelter system and to a clinic, and he had no assets of any kind.

He was not near the line.

He was not on the line.

He was at the bottom of the chart.

And I sat at my kitchen table on the nineteenth of April and realized that the reason nobody had applied for him was that there was nobody to apply.

He was too ill by the November.

He had no family.

The shelter had a caseworker with a hundred and forty clients.