M&Ms and safety pins: The life and death of the woman everyone saw but no one knew

They called her the Safeway Lady. The Bag Lady. She was the woman who wore every piece of clothing she owned, always black, even in the heat of a Phoenix summer. The homeless woman who walked the soles off every pair of shoes people gave her. The lady with the ice-blue eyes.

That was what people remembered. Those eyes. Two clear reminders that her body still held something inside. But sometimes those eyes clouded over, and that spark of life disappeared, and the woman screamed at a devil nobody else could see.

The clouds descended one last time on Oct. 13. A neighbor watched her in her usual spot, near a bus stop in north-central Phoenix. She howled and jabbed her finger and stomped her tattered feet, throwing everything she owned onto the street. Neighbors tuned out yet another outburst. Passing cars scattered her water cups and ripped open her sleeping bag.

Then the sickness let go. Her mind cleared. She checked the spot where a neighbor often left food and shoes. Nothing. She cut across Glendale Avenue, trying to collect her few belongings.

Halfway across the street, she froze. Cars shot past on either side. The neighbor watched her pick something up. A small SUV bore down on her.

The driver never saw her.

Neighbors came down their driveways to find her sprawled on the asphalt, between the dented SUV and the patch of dirt where she slept. They didn’t know her, but they recognized her. She was the woman they always saw walking. The person no one could help. Now she lay motionless and alone.

As first responders made their way toward the neighborhood, bouncing red-and-blue lights off million-dollar homes, a couple stepped into the street. They approached slowly, carefully. The man checked her pulse. Did he feel it? Was she there?

Beside him the woman knelt on the asphalt, down toward a stranger's battered body, and took a limp hand in her own.

A community aching to help

She was gone three days before the rest of the neighborhood noticed. The Safeway Lady had become another invisible death on the streets of Phoenix, where neither the city nor the county can track how many people die while homeless.

Maricopa County’s best guess is between 200 and 400 people each year, though it can only count how many of the dead used homeless services, not how many were homeless when they died.

So the city’s disappeared are an uncountable few. Many crash through safety nets and fade into the background of their neighborhood, landing in the newspaper with a placeholder name: Phoenix Phoenix, 70, their obituaries read, died Tuesday afternoon …

But the Safeway Lady had an identity and a neighborhood that thought it knew her. Regulars learned to drive looking not at the road but at the sidewalks, searching for the woman in all black. When they found her, they rarely stopped.

One woman thought it would be more respectful to leave her alone. Some were startled by her appearance, uncertain how to look past her broken teeth or her hair that was matted so tightly it looked like a beaver's tail.

A few tried to help. They offered her food, clothing, shelter. One woman drove her to a Motel 6 and paid for the room. The Safeway Lady used the shower and slipped out. The local veterinarian’s office let her use its bathroom. A nearby nursery let her walk among the flowers. Countless Safeway customers asked to buy her a meal, and she almost always refused. She never took money.

“Most of the time, when you’d offer help, she’d turn it down,” said Sandy Leander, who lives in the neighborhood. The two women had met years earlier, but had only one conversation. Leander once brought a sleeping bag that was promptly returned. “I think it was a community aching to help this person.”

It never had the chance. The best anybody could do for her life was watch and hope somebody did something.

Then there was a death on Glendale Avenue. Three days later, the first posts about the accident appeared on Nextdoor, a neighborhood-specific social network.

“I heard the ‘Safeway homeless woman’ died,” began one thread.

“I have tears in my eyes as I write this,” started another.

Hundreds of comments poured in. They filled one thread, then another, then another. People said they had seen her try to cross a busy street before, standing frozen with one foot off the sidewalk. They remembered how she turned away their offers of popsicles and hotel rooms.

“I saw her every day,” one woman replied.

“I said a little prayer everytime I saw her,” another wrote. “I think we all feel like we knew her — so sad.”

That stretch of north-central Phoenix sees itself as a close community, a break in the stereotype of wealthy urban neighborhoods. People there volunteer. They pay attention. They watch each other’s kids and check on the cats when neighbors leave for vacation.

Now a fixture of their neighborhood was gone, and thoughts turned to the woman’s burial. She had no family in her life. Her few friends lived alongside her on the streets.

Any service would have to come from the neighborhood. So eight days after the accident, almost 50 volunteers met at a local deli. They split themselves into committees: a group to plan the funeral, another to raise money, another to reach out to homeless services to make sure it never happened again. Slowly, they started to piece together the life they had watched fade away.

She was 52 years old. She died carrying nothing but 18 safety pins.

Her name was Anita.

A life her own shadows

Anita died less than five miles from where she grew up, in a blue house on Whitton Avenue. Her aunt Louisene bought the house in 1980, moving her sister and niece from Michigan to an unremarkable life in central Phoenix.

Lou, as everybody called her, was a widow and retiree. Anita’s father never appeared in Phoenix. Her mother rarely left the house, venturing outside only to spend her days at the Arizona State Hospital.

The family of three kept to themselves. A former neighbor remembered Anita as shy and simple. But there was always something in her eyes.

“You just knew she was different,” said Jeanie Spaich-Blake, who grew up across the street from Anita's family and now works with patients suffering from mental illness. “It’s like a blank stare. There’s not a fluid conversation.”

Anita didn’t speak often, but her snow-white skin and bright blue eyes let her make friends at Longview Elementary School. Later, she moved to Central High, where she slid through four years without a foothold.

Central’s yearbooks don’t show Anita in any clubs or activities. No skills or talents emerged. She didn’t play sports or excel in the classroom. Not a single photo from pep rallies or junior proms include her. Her only high-school job, at a sausage shop, ended after a futile few weeks. She graduated in 1983 and stayed in her aunt’s house.

Life sped up. Anita married a man named John, a professor at a local community college, and started work as a psychiatric case manager. She also went through spurts without taking her own medication, giving in to an extreme case of bipolar disorder.

Her mind faltered and her weight ballooned. She stopped working. Then the stable framework of Anita's life fell apart. Louisene was diagnosed with lung cancer and died six months later, in 2003. Anita sold the house and moved out, using part of the $122,000 on a brand-new car.

Four months later, she and John divorced.

After the divorce, Anita launched into a string of boyfriends and apartments. She moved into an apartment on 24th Street, then one on Indian School. She stayed with John’s grandmother for a short time.

John helped her with almost every move, each time loading fewer and fewer things into her new place. She kept his phone number and his last name.

An old acquaintance from high school, who said he had few memories of Anita back then, remembered her coming to his apartment to party. She drank too much, he remembered, and often took an entire month’s worth of medication at once. Still, she rarely spoke.

Within two years, the money from Lou’s house was gone. Anita declared bankruptcy in 2005, listing her debts at more than $40,000. Court records show she had a bank account with $150. An ex-boyfriend, she said, had disappeared with her truck, so she owned a 1978 Chevrolet Caprice. She listed the rest of her belongings as a couch, a lamp, a chest, a set of bedding and a $35 TV.

Then she disappeared.

John moved on, or tried. He remarried and kept teaching. But the phone kept bringing the news of his ex-wife’s decline.

In 2017 he received a call from the Arizona Department of Transportation. The agent thought somebody had been impersonating his ex-wife. A woman, the agent explained, had tried to use Anita’s name, and that raised a flag, because Social Security had reported Anita dead in 2010.

“That sounds like her,” John told the agent.

He had seen her just a few months earlier, standing at a bus stop on 24th Street. He stopped and gave her a phone number for Social Security, because he knew she hadn’t received her latest disability checks. She remembered him.

The woman in black was alive. But Anita was gone.

Behind a tree, waiting

She slept against the wall of a gated community, folded in the corner behind a leafy tree. Landscapers worked around her every morning, because to wake Anita was to risk seeing her explode.

In the mornings she crawled out onto the sidewalk, wearing everything she owned and carrying two empty cups. She would walk. Every day she walked down Glendale Avenue, stopping to make sure everybody was where they were supposed to be. She found Fuzzy and Freeway and Rich, sometimes handing them a dollar bill they always gave back.

First she walked east, stopping at an irrigation system along 16th Street. Friends watched as she threw the cups high in the air and chased wherever the wind carried them. Sometimes the cups landed in the grass, but sometimes she dashed into the street, never checking for incoming traffic.

Then Anita turned back toward Safeway, rifling through garbage cans on her way. When summer came, she walked through a church lawn to cool her feet.

Businesses on her route all learned Anita’s favorites. Employees at the Safeway deli learned to stop customers from buying her a meal unless they asked her first. The Pei Wei night shift handed her leftovers. Sometimes she had a stretch of clarity, and managed to use a small pot of money that came from the government to buy herself a sandwich.

Thousands of people drove past. A small few offered help.

“I’m OK,” she always said, smiling.

Then she’d crawl back into her corner, lean against the smooth wall and hold her eyes open as long as possible.

Who will mourn the lost?

But the neighborhood knew her only as the Safeway Lady. In the weeks after her death, the group of neighborhood volunteers tried to answer the impossible questions of a hollow life: Should she be buried, or cremated? Would she have wanted a funeral? Who would come? Was she religious?

Her belongings gave up few clues. At a friend’s house, she kept a small pillow with “Hugs” embroidered across the fabric, a poem called “God’s Handprint” and a framed picture of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. But she had also kept her mother’s Bible. Maybe that was a sign.

The neighbors decided the service should be kept local, along the path Anita walked. Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, where she had stopped to cool her feet in the grass, offered its sanctuary.

After a Sunday church crowd filtered out, Sandy Leander and the group of volunteers prepared the place for a funeral. They covered the marble altar with the pillow and the poem, the only two photos of Anita they could find and a box meant for ashes that sat empty.

Among the tributes sat a glass jar the color of Anita’s eyes. It held 18 safety pins.

Volunteers posted flyers and invitations across the neighborhood, but still there was no way to know how many people would come. Who mourned for the lost? Nobody knew.

The first mourners arrived half an hour early, wearing both clothing and expressions that seemed casual for a funeral. They scribbled onto nametags and signed a guestbook, then sat in neat packs across the pews. They came alone and they came in groups. Old friends walked in together, remembering the last time they had seen her. New neighbors met for the first time.

By the time a pastor lit a candle and the service began, 136 people had arrived. People who had long thought they were the only one realized that everybody else saw Anita, too.

“On behalf of our community, I want to thank you all for coming,” Pastor Brent Maxwell said, starting the service he promised would have only “a slightly Christian flavor.” He worked out of another church in Paradise Valley, but lived in the north-central area. His family had known Anita for six years, ever since they saw her walking on Glendale. “She was hard to miss,” Maxwell said, and a knowing murmur rippled through the pews.

He told them about the first time he saw Anita, about her blue eyes that cut through whatever clouded her mind that day. About his wife’s insistence on checking on Anita every few days, giving her shoes and blankets that always ended up on somebody else. About his church’s day spent passing out food on the streets, and how he had kept a special bundle just for Anita, but couldn’t find her. About the call he received two days later, telling him the story of Anita’s death. About the one time he heard Anita laugh.

It was Halloween 2015, and Maxwell passed her on his way back from the store. He stopped and walked toward her, his hand stuffed with candy.

“Anita,” he said, “I have something for you.”

She stepped back. Her face crinkled.

“Candy?” she asked.

“It’s Halloween,” he explained. “Everyone’s going to have candy. You should have some candy on Halloween.”

She laughed and smiled, and together they shared his handful of candy. Maxwell never learned why she laughed at his offer.

But in the pews, a man named Rich knew why.

For years Rich lived alongside Anita, keeping watch over the tiny woman who slept against the wall. He memorized her routine because he had become part of it, a reluctant recipient of so many dollar bills and M&M’s.

When Anita had a few dollars to spare, Rich recalled, she bought M&M’s. Plain and peanut, usually. Then she found her friends and handed each person four M&M’s, always in four different colors.

So he came to the funeral dressed like his friend: Black shoes, black sweats, a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head. He found a pair of her sweats and wore them underneath his, even as the temperature pushed over 80 degrees.

He walked into the parking lot and lit a cigarette as Maxwell ended the service in prayer. People filtered from the sanctuary to the reception in Fellowship Hall. Rich waited for Maxwell.

A few minutes later the pastor walked across the courtyard and sat at a table outside, a cookie and a Styrofoam cup in his hands. Rich stubbed out his cigarette and slipped it into his pocket, picking up the four bags of candy Anita bought the day before she died.

With small steps he walked toward Maxwell’s table, where a small circle of people had gathered. He cleared his throat. The group turned toward him.

He dropped the unopened bags onto the table.

“This,” he said as the table wobbled, “is from Anita.”

'I hope you know how many people cared'

Her ashes came back in a tiny box, a cardboard canister for 52 years of life.

Three weeks after Anita’s funeral, Leander carried the box into another church and set it on a table next to the jar of safety pins. Behind it she placed an unlit candle, a photo of Anita and a list of songs she had chosen for the interment. Then she sat and stared at her shaking hands as new friends filed into Church of the Beatitudes.

Three pastors from three separate churches arrived for the interment. Neighbors hugged and clasp hands. Volunteers brought donated flowers and the photos of Anita. And a man nobody knew walked through the crowd. He sat in the second row and closed his eyes.

Nobody there had met the man, but Leander knew him immediately.

John had come to see his ex-wife.

Sunlight sliced through the courtyard. The acoustic playlist Leander had spent hours selecting played from the corner. The small group took their seats and faced the columbarium wall, where one space waited dark and open.

The music faded out when Rev. Tony Minear stood to speak. His church, founded on the principles of tolerance and love for all, provided Anita’s space in the columbarium for half the price. He read a passage from the Book of Psalms, hoping Anita had somehow heard its message of peace and rest. Then Maxwell stood and prayed for the chance to meet Anita again.

Finally Leander stepped forward. Her eyes reddened as she read from a crinkled piece of paper.

“It’s clear that she was a survivor,” Leander said. She had watched Anita’s body shrink and seen her feet wear down. Her appearance scared people. But when her eyes were clear and her mind was active, Leander said, Anita managed to survive more than a decade on her own.

“Anita,” she continued, “I hope you know how many people cared.”

She nodded toward the back. Minear picked up the box of ashes and carried it toward the columbarium wall. Together they slid the box into the darkness and attached the marble cover, locking in place the name nobody knew:

Anita Jean Young Collins.

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