Chris Collins
Charles “Maverick” Masini — in a 2015 photo — died on Oct. 21 after a long battle with cancer.
When Karen Andro first encountered Charles “Maverick” Masini in 2015 outside the First United Methodist Church, she was a little afraid of him.
“He was swearing outside of our church,” remembers Andro, who is director of the church’s Hope’s Home Ministries and Loaves and Fishes Kitchen. “I remember locking our doors thinking he might cause a problem.”
Eventually, Andro got to know Maverick. As was his habit, Maverick endeared himself to her. “You have to look below the surface. If I only went on the outward appearance, at times he exhibited anger,” Andro says. “But deep down, Maverick had a lot of understanding of the world and the world’s complications. At his core, he was a very loving individual.”
It was clear to anyone who knew Maverick — whom Isthmus wrote about in June 2015 — that he was dying and needed care.
So Andro and a group of other homeless advocates began looking out for him.
“A group of us really tried to answer his calls for help, because he was so vulnerable,” Andro says. “We called it team Maverick. There were like seven of us.”
With the help of Housing Initiatives and Tellurian, Maverick eventually found housing. On Oct. 21, the 72-year-old died there, surrounded by friends after a long struggle with cancer.
Skyler Van De Weerd, a friend of Maverick’s who works at Tellurian, says his situation underscores how local providers need to be flexible.
“I think he did a lot to change how we look at the services we provide. There’s not a cookie-cutter style that will work with everybody,” she says. “None of our traditional methods worked for Maverick. We had to throw the book out and make this personalized team to accommodate exactly what he needed.”
Several homeless advocates — many of them friends of Maverick — are working on two initiatives to help people in similar situations. MACH1Health would create a team to bring health care to people on the street. A second initiative, Solace Home, would create a hospice home where the homeless could die in comfort with dignity.
In the mid-2000s, Dr. Ann Catlett was starting her career as a hospitalist and palliative care physician at Meriter Hospital when she helped treat a man who had just been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
The hospital tried connecting him to services, but ended up discharging him to the street. “He probably had months to live,” Catlett remembers. “And there was this sense he’s going to get lost and die an uncomfortable death.”
A few years after that, Catlett visited Joseph’s House in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1990 during the AIDS epidemic as a place where homeless people suffering from the disease could die in peace. When that illness became more treatable, the house’s mission broadened to serve any homeless person at the end of life.
“The people who were living there felt deeply cared for and you could tell,” Catlett says. “These are people who have not had a big welcome and now they do. It’s too bad it’s happening at this time of their life, but that big welcome was profound for them.”
Seeing the house inspired Catlett to found Solace Home, a group dedicated to establishing a similar place in Madison. The group has a letter of intent to work with Porchlight on the project. The goal is to have space for up to four people at a time who would receive round-the-clock care from full-time caregivers, supplemented by volunteers.
Statistics for how many people need this type of care are hard to come by. Solace Home estimates it’s about 15 to 20 each year in Madison.
Catlett says homeless people face extreme health risks. Most single men who are homeless lose housing in their early 40s. Once on the streets, their life expectancy is five years.
“These people have exposures, they have infections, some have complications of substance use and mental illness,” Catlett says. “They don’t [have] access [to] health care.”
Although living on the street is filled with perils, most homeless people die from chronic illnesses.
“They have chronic illnesses that are not getting treated,” she says. “Most of them are not dying of hypothermia or trauma or drug overdoses or alcohol intoxication.”
Catlett’s other project — MACH1Health (an acronym for Madison Area Care for the Homeless) — is working to connect homeless people who are not facing imminent death with health care.
The idea is to create a team of providers that would do weekly rounds to people on the street. “At first, it might be making sure people have clean and dry socks, water, that they feel safe and the women have pepper spray,” she says. “As they get to know us, and express curiosity about who we are, we’ll say ‘we’re health care providers.’”
The group hopes to accompany some people to medical appointments during the day. “If we establish trusting relationships, we might help people access the system,” Catlett says.
Catlett says there are other people now trying to provide care, including health care providers who make rounds with the Friends of State Street Family. “We’re not going to be the first.”
But interest in establishing a regular service is high. About 20 health care providers are signed up to do rounds, which is more than the group probably needs. The group has secured a two-year grant through the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, which would pay the salary of a project coordinator and some salary support for Catlett. The group hopes to start doing rounds in a month.
Catlett first met Maverick in the summer of 2015, when a friend told her about someone living on the street who appeared “near death.”
Catlett and Maverick became fast friends. “He was perceptive, intelligent and articulate, when he was probably not using,” she says. “There were times he was not as articulate and other times when he wanted to talk about all sorts of things.”
Maverick supported the effort to start a hospice house for the homeless — he suggested she call it St. Dismas after the thief crucified next to Jesus.
Although they lost touch for a while, Catlett reconnected with Maverick in his apartment last month shortly before he died.
“We had a delightful time and he was saying things like, ‘I’m ready, this living is no good, death bring it on,’” Catlett says.
A memorial was held for him on Oct. 30 at First United Methodist. Friends remember him as being passionate about the environment, animals and human rights.
Friends admit that he could be beguiling and sporadically maddening. Van De Weerd remembers him routinely disrupting support groups she ran at Bethel Lutheran Church. During one session, he laid in the middle of the group on the floor and refused to be quiet. Eventually, he pulled out a marker and started writing on the floor.
Van De Weerd got up to take the marker away. “I look and he has written ‘Maverick loves you.’ What do you do now?” she says. “That was him. He was just irreverent to social norms, irascible, but his goal at the end of the day was to spread love. He did it in his own way, and we didn’t understand it at the time.”
