People at the Drop-In die all the time. And we who work here — we don’t always know that they’ve died, at least not straight away. Sometimes it might take weeks.

Someone will ring and tell us the news. A relative might turn up (though usually not), or the police will arrive. And we mourn their deaths.

We hold a funeral, and participants tell stories and light candles, and then we all sing: Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In.

In memory of David, who died alone.Credit: AFP

But recently we heard the news that another of our own had been found, after a welfare check, in his flat, surrounded by his towers of books. And I — for the first time, in all these years, with all this dying — felt a kind of burning anger, and also a kind of falling.

“This job is too hard,” I heard myself say.........

© The Sydney Morning Herald