Denise deserves our help.

We live in the wealthiest country, not just in the world, but in the HISTORY of the world. And yet all around us, our neighbors live in grinding poverty.

Take my friend Denise.

She used to work as a cashier at the 7-11 down the street from me. Denise is one of those people who is so naturally kind and friendly that soon everyone who shops there gets to know her and like her, including me. We just got to be friends, like so many other people Denise encounters in her life. She treats you like she's always known you.

Denise belongs to the “working poor.”

She works hard and cheerfully, more than most of us, but she’s paid so little that every bill is an emergency that sends her searching for small change, and personal treasures to sell, so she can make her rent, or pay her light bill, or get her phone switched back on. Is it stressful? What do you think? Practically every day is another financial crisis for her.

It takes its toll on her health.

One of her colleagues at the 7-11 who worked the overnight graveyard shift had a heart attack, and it fell to Denise to cover for him. She’d work all night, go home for a few hours rest, and then be expected back at work in the afternoon for her regular shift. She was desperately sleep-deprived, and it was making her sick

But she also needed every dollar just to survive.

Meanwhile, her landlady was threatening to raise the rent on her tiny leaky basement apartment that tends to flood in the rain. Wells Fargo was changing her $35 a week for being $5 overdrawn since she paid Dominion, who were threatening to switch off her power in the dead of winter. When her car broke down, she needed to take out a title loan to get it fixed so she could keep getting to and from work, but if she can’t make the payments she loses the car too. So she carries about $3000 of debt on top of everything else that serves as a constant threat that she will lose even the meager possessions she still has.

Nickeled and dimed to death.

Then the 7-11 got robbed at gun-point while she was working there alone in the middle of the night. Afterwards, the cops showed her store’s surveillance video of the robber standing behind her with his gun, just watching her, deciding what he wanted to do with her before he finally revealed himself and threatened to kill her. It gave her nightmares.

It took its toll on her health.

It was not long after that, just before her 60th birthday, while she was working the register at 7-11, that Denise went limp all down her left side. Her co-worker called 9-11 and they took Denise to UVA hospital where they found she had suffered a stroke, and that it was not her first. She’s had a smaller “silent stroke” a few months before and didn’t even know it.

Aspirin and rest and grinding poverty.

Denise recovered most of her strength and feeling in the hospital, and her doctors prescribed blood pressure medicine and aspirin and sent her home. They told her to take it easy, not to work so hard. Not to work at all, in fact. She is not permitted by her doctors to drive or work for the foreseeable future. Which makes sense. Denise got off fairly easy with this second stroke, but still has terrible dizziness, fatigue, headaches, and she can’t bend over or pick up anything heavier than a gallon of milk. Her blood pressure continues to spike from time to time, causing small relapses of paralysis in one side.

She is not well enough to work.

Even if she wanted to defy her doctor’s instructions, 7-11 won’t take her back without their signing off on it. She was supposed to have some insurance through her job for such emergencies, but, of course, her supervisor never checked that box on a form, so Denise is left with nothing. No income. No way to get any. A negative balance in her bank account, and no one in the world to help her.

Denise has no one.

She has no family with the resources to help her. The institutions who are supposed to help her are slow and underfunded and overwhelmed. She has nobody.

Well, she has me.

And she has the customers at 7-11 who miss her and ask about her. And her, friend, and 7-11 co-worker, Charles, who co-signed her car loan, and drives her to her doctors. She has some of us who love her and care for her.

And maybe she has you. I hope so.

I want to ask you to help me raise the money Denise needs to recover from her strokes, get out from under her debts, and pay for the bare essentials for at least six months so that she can figure out how to survive going forward.

Going forward.

I think Denise needs to get on disability, but to get that, she may need a lawyer, I’m told, and she’ll need time and resources she doesn’t currently have to seek that kind of solution. She doesn’t want to go on the dole. She wants to work. She an old-fashioned country girl in that respect. But she literally can’t work right now, and the “system” is failing her, so she needs her friends and neighbors and good people more fortunate than she to step up. Even just a little.

You know the drill. Sadly.

Every donation, no matter how big or small, will make a difference. It’s a cliché because, sadly—so sadly—we need to say it too often. But I know some of us have enough that we can donate something. Enough for her to restock on toilet paper, pay an electric bill, or a month’s rent, or help her to get her car out of hock.

Denise deserves it.

And I'll tell you a secret. It feels good. It feels good to help someone in need who deserves it.

Every opportunity to do so is a gift to the giver.

So thank you, friends. And you're welcome.