He was trying to sober up. He never got the chance

ERIN ANDERSSEN
Globe and Mail Update
July 26, 2008 at 1:13 AM EDT

‘I'm home!” – that was how Mitchell Anderson liked to announce his arrival on the many late nights he staggered into the overnight shelter at the Shepherds Of Good Hope in Ottawa, looking for a place to sleep off a drinking binge. He had a regular panhandling spot outside Elgin Street where, his friends say, his smiling compliments to passing woman helped him raise change for a bottle of sherry faster than just about anyone else. Drunk, he couldn't walk away from a fight; his face carried the scars of angry fists. But sober, he'd offer up his last cigarette if asked.

They told some of these stories this week at his funeral, held in a crowded chapel at the Shepherds, attended by staff who knew Mr. Anderson, his family and his friends from the street. They spoke, in particular, to his teenaged daughter, Christine, hunched over in tears in the second row, who had just been growing close to her father again. They know who she is, because Mr. Anderson talked about her all the time. She was the reason he stopped wandering and returned to Ottawa. Why, at 38, he wanted to deal with his alcohol addiction and go straight.

“He was really trying to kick it,” says Ryan Curran, a frontline worker at the shelter. “I honestly believed he was one of the guys who was going to sober up.”

He never got the chance.
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