Deborah Arlene Thompson was born on October 21, 1961, in Hillsboro, Oregon; a small town, the administrative seat of Washington county, an outer suburb on the western rural fringe of Portland’s metropolitan area. The presiding physician was Dr. Seaver, a longtime family doctor, a stocky, good-humored man who looked something like a silver haired Spencer Tracy.
Not sure what Dr. Seaver looked like to little Debbie but from the start her big brown eyes looked fascinated by the world around her. Big brown saucer eyes like big brown marbles, like a Margaret Keane painting, everywhere in those days, only Debbie’s eyes didn’t look so much sad as absorbed, taking in everything and easily delighted by everything around her. Her grandfather, on her mom’s side, called her “Brownie” and liked to bounce her on his knee, threatening to hug her with his sandpapery whiskers.
Actually, Debbie was marked by a stubbornness and an intent to go her own way from an early age. She took swimming lessons when she was six or seven. After her first lesson her mother asked the instructor how the lesson went. They explained little Debbie seemed an attentive listener, paying attention while receiving instructions, but then left on her own paddled happily around as if she’d hadn't received any instructions at all. Or on another occasion around this time in her early life, demanding her turn to name the new family dog, she announced that our new little wiener-dog would be known as Dairy, resisted indignantly my protest that that wasn’t a real name and so Dairy the Dachshund it was. One of our favorite family dogs as kids.
Debbie grew up stubborn and emotional, like her mother, but also toughened up by a bossy dad and older brother. She was a top recruit for my various neighborhood games and schemes, most of them rough and some of them even stupid dangerous: army in the woods, dirt clod wars, kickball, track-meets in the cul-de-sac we lived on in Beaverton; the same Washington County, but closer to Portland, more fully suburbanized or at least suburbanizing. When we moved into the neighborhood our backyard behind our house spilled into wetlands and small forests. By the time we moved seven years later it was a suburban grid of tract housing for miles, going all the way to Tigard, the next town south. Debbie’s battle scar evidence from this early backyard neighborhood education was a chipped front tooth caused by playing something like air hockey with billiard balls on a rec room pool table, the offending blow delivered inadvertently by me.
In truth, if there ever was a time for Deb to be made to feel second-fiddle, the put-on younger sibling, it was in those years of our adolescence. It felt like my mom was constantly carting me around to little league baseball games and dragging Debbie along. Or a little later when I started “driving” I would leave Deb at home when my parents were out or rope her and her friends into experimenting with alcohol and marijuana, truth or dare, or joyrides in one of our parent’s cars, without my parent’s permission, and before any of us even had a driver’s license. But she never protested much about any of this later.
She read a lot then, always had a book, long before I’d slowed down enough to enjoy reading anything beyond the Box scores, and loved to argue with my mother and me, in my memory, about anything, but women’s rights and religion were big. Actually, our mother seemed to encourage, even relish these heated discussions but as soon as the heat turned up even a notch in our banter my dad, if he was around, would nix the discussion or flee the house-- “too much damn talk!”-- working outside on something, anything to get away from our maddening arguments.
Once she started high school Deb got a part-time job with a grocery store in town and her first car, a sporty red convertible Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. She seemed to be thriving with the newfound independence, wheels and spending money. Fun road trips with friends followed to the beach, the Oregon Coast, to Portland, including eventually a weekend visit with a friend to me then already away at college. But it's also somewhere in these latter teenage years that she developed an eating disorder, Bulimia, although it is not clear when exactly it began. I'm not sure if it was before I left for college or after. Either way, I didn’t become fully aware of it, or begin to talk with her about it until a few years later living together again away from home in Portland.
Also somewhere near the end of high school she joined a local church with a friend for reasons it appeared connected to the youth activities and community associated with the church. We had a few observant Catholic relatives and were baptized in some Protestant church but never attended church with our parents. This also marks the point at which our sibling debates took on a decided religious turn.
Debbie became an enthusiastic Christian believer and seemed to enjoy arguing with my obstinately illiterate religious skepticism. In Christian teachings she had found redemption from relativist cynicism and despair, which she associated with the rest of us nonbelievers. The duplicity, doubts, and corruption of life could be better endured, if not overcome, in the example of Jesus Christ, Deb argued. I would feign tolerance and scoff at her passionate convictions with my own crude secular arguments. But instead of resentful she usually seemed, as she always had, invigorated by the banter we had together.
After high school Debbie drove her red VW convertible to Linfield College in nearby McMinnville but dropped out after a year, overwhelmed by the temptations of the party life in the college dorms. Two years prior a dorm advisor had dryly observed to my freshman cohort that less than half of us would make it to the end of the year, unable to balance ‘dorm life’ with a college academic course load. I think I only made it through that first year because I really wasn’t sure yet I could hack college academically, having basically bluffed my way through high school. But Debbie was already a good student, a big reader with good study habits. School had always been relatively easy to her but once away from home and confronted with seemingly boundless opportunities to hang out with her friends homework was routinely brushed aside until it was too late.
But rather than being crushed by this setback, Deb actually seemed empowered by it. She pivoted, moving into the city, Portland, looking to make her own way, living in a series of cheap apartments and eventually big group houses with new friends she made as a canvasser for the SANE/FREEZE movement. Working for SANE, later changing its name to Peace Action, she made new friends, some who would become close comrades for many years, met her first serious boyfriend, and announced that she would heretofore be known as “Allie,” Debbie being retired for a new start in life.
Allie bonded with her new friends in group houses that buzzed with the energy of a stovetop espresso maker and impassioned late-night gab sessions. She bought all her clothes at thrift shops, and modeled a hip urban bohemian style, to the dismay of her long-time square-dancing parents, decades before Urban Outfitters and Red Light turned this into a franchised urban commercial niche. She hadn’t abandoned her religious beliefs but they took on a political specificity now. She was anti-nuclear war, anti-violence, anti-racist, anti-patriarchy, anti-corporate, like most disaffected youth moving into cities in the 1980s, and determined to carve out her own life path, committed to an independent, feminist, do-it-yourselfer lifestyle.
Then in the late-1980s she moved to Seattle, where I had moved a short time before, and lived again with me in a couple group houses, one on Queen Anne for a year or two and another on Beacon Hill for three or four years, made up of old SANE/FREEZE friends that followed her to Seattle, and various other work acquaintances and fellow urban travelers that came and went. Her first real job in Seattle was for the West Seattle Recycling Center, where she worked in a variety of roles, earning the respect and trust of the owner and the at-risk youth she worked with.
Throughout this period of her life Allie remained a big reader and liked pushing her favorite authors on others: Doris Lessing, Jacques Ellull, Mircea Eliade. It wasn’t until decades later, unfortunately, that I fully appreciated her connection with Lessing. The echoes of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in my sister’s life are remarkable: 1. Trying to live in the modern city as an independent woman; 2. Chafing at male privilege in the dating wars; 3. Disillusionment with corrupt social institutions; 4. Left liberal spiritual yearning for social justice and transcendence; and 5. All intertwined with personal struggles with mental health.
When I would try to talk to her during this period, 1980s, specifically about her problems, how her eating disorder got started, she would relate this story from our teenage years that I barely recalled but seemed to resonate with her profoundly as a slight emblematic of her deepest feelings. The story went back to our high school years. I was at a friend’s house when his parents were out. Allie was with two of her friends, one of which, had a crush on me, and would later become my first serious girlfriend.
Only a few blocks away at the time her friends proposed prowling around the house where my friend and I were hanging out, throwing pinecones at the house, pranking us. They did so but when we wandered outside to investigate Allie immediately bolted, as she had thought that was their plan. I didn’t even realize at first that Allie was with them. Her two friends ducked lamely behind a couple cars in the driveway and were quickly discovered. We then goofed around with them for a bit but didn’t invite them in, way beyond our courage level at that point, and my friend’s parents were due home anytime anyway. So we joked and tossed pinecones around until the girls said they had to find Debbie and left. In my vague memory we were out there ten-fifteen minutes max. But in Allie’s later recounting it was an excruciatingly long time when she felt abandoned and betrayed. She realized or figured, anyway, her friends had actually wanted to be caught by us all along, and for what felt like an eternity to her, until they caught back up with her, she felt like they had abandoned her.
It is also telling, no doubt, that around the time she started relating this story to me, then in our mid-20s, I had begun sexual relations with another one of her friends. I really was not conscious of taking either of these friends away from her but, regardless, this was how it felt to Allie: I was stealing her friends away from her, or they were merely using her to get to me, and this was relevant to her struggling feelings as a teenager and developing an eating disorder.
I have no memory of ever witnessing Allie experiencing textbook psychotic break, talking gibberish, but it was around this time that an emotional volatility and anger in her behavior around the group house began concerning those close to her. Her old passion for argument seemed to turn more frequently bitter. A group of her friends, those in our house and others around her, organized an intervention where we all sat down with her for a talk and urged her to seek counseling through a referral we’d secured with a local healthcare clinic. She seemed to appreciate the gesture, saw the counselor for six months or so, did in fact stop flying off the handle so much but came out of it a fiercely born-again Christian, again. Whether it actually ended her eating disorder was never clear.
It was also about this time-- in retrospect, not wisely—I encouraged and Allie tried her hand at opening a small lunchtime restaurant with her friend, and housemate, Fran. Fran was a great friend to Allie going back to her days with the SANE Freeze movement. I already had a full-time job but agreed to help with the books. Part of the inspiration were these delicious coconut-filled pocket pastries that Allie baked. Everybody loved them and they sold well at the coffee and juice cart Fran already worked at in downtown Seattle.
Fran and Allie opened a morning and lunchtime shop in a space that otherwise operated at night as a bar in Pioneer Square. The menu was an abbreviated hybrid of a coffee cart, then sprouting up everywhere in Seattle, and a very simple tacos and burritos joint. The latter loosely modeled after the Mission District taquerias in San Francisco, a favorite stop on Bay Area road-trips, but hadn’t yet become common in Seattle the way they are now. I’m biased but it really was a great place, or had great food, anyway, but was not unlike its famous namesake stressed out by internal squabbling and overwhelmed by difficulties from the start.
The struggling startup business totally alienated Allie. She missed, by her own account, the sense of do-good work she got out of SANE and the West Seattle Recycling Center. Her attention was drawn to the homeless and at-risk youth that frequented the Pioneer Square courtyard out front of The Alamo. She eventually quit, barely six months after opening, and the business, without her support, didn’t last much more than a year.
In this confusing transition, generating tremendous strain on her friendship with Fran, Allie attempted to help a drunken homeless man she had met outside The Alamo stop drinking. Her first plan was to drive up into the woods with the guy, camp somewhere and assist the guy in going cold turkey for as long as it would take, presumably. This plan alarmed her housemates and we pleaded with her to find another way to help, which seemed to sideline the cold turkey getaway plan, but transformed quickly into bringing the guy home to live with her in our group house, without discussing this new plan with the rest of us or even introducing him to anybody else in the house. The house objected to this plan as well and confronted her about it in a tense house meeting. She was defiant, unapologetic, blamed me mostly, and accused all of us as being too “genteel,” the last thing any of us wanted to be at that point in our lives.
She then moved out of the Beacon group house and lived for the first time alone in a one-bedroom apartment, only a couple miles away. Relations with her old group house friends, including Fran, were never quite the same afterwards. She returned to the house regularly for big dinners and holiday events but now, truly on her own, she went full bore into working with homeless and at-risk youth and, by all appearances, for a while she seemed to be thriving in this work. She worked for Youth Advocates, hanging out around various youth centers, and doing what she could to help kids going in and out of the juvenile detention system. By all accounts she was doing quite well, meeting an expanding network of new friends and helping at-risk youth find some stability in their lives.
Eventually she moved into a house two doors down from the old group house we’d all shared on Beacon. Our landlord, Sandy, an old friend of Fran’s, owned three houses in a row on a block behind the Pacific Tower, and agreed to rent one to Alle. The house in the middle Sandy had turned into an AIDs hospice, while she lived in her very nicely furnished daylight basement. The house on the northside was our old Beacon group house. And now the house on the southside of Sandy’s place she was renting to Allie. This rental agreement with Sandy was apparently on the condition that Allie did not start housing homeless kids, as we had all heard she was doing since leaving our old group house. But not six months later Allie had a rotating gaggle of five to seven kids crashing at her place regularly and Sandy took steps to have her evicted.
This time Allie refused to leave, however, convinced she was doing God’s work, also convinced that God and passages in the Bible had promised her a local rock star was going to rescue her and her homeless brood and take them to some new house where their doors would always remain open to the homeless. After an excruciatingly tense standoff on eviction day a phone call to the local musician seemed to momentarily break Allie’s delusional spell and diffuse the situation. But everyone close to her was stunned by this latest turn of events. And the experience so embittered Sandy that the Beacon group house soon broke up for good and we tried another intervention with Allie.
Again, Allie seemed momentarily touched by the concern but was now irreversibly committed to what she was now calling her “missionary” work. She eventually rented another house in the Genesee area of Rainier Valley in Seattle and more or less repeated what had happened on Beacon. She brought home troubled kids, so many the place became infamous with the Seattle Police, and eventually she was evicted. Also, eventually, the problem became so big that her employer objected and demanded that she stop taking home the kids she worked with or be fired. So she quit. She was then for a time homeless herself, living out of her VW van, but still trying to help kids get off drugs, get jobs, and writing letters to those now doing time in jail.
To say that by this time her old friends and loved ones were concerned about her is gross understatement. But direct interventions seemed to do no good and maybe, we feared, even provoked her stubborn independence to greater extremes. We offered her housing again but our conditions were never acceptable to her. So we watched, feeling helpless.
And, again, going her own way, Alle’s ability to pick up the pieces appeared to prevail. She soon picked up a part-time job with a craft gift business and became friends with the owners. Her parents, near full-time RV-ing now, would visit Allie at small arts festivals where she’d work a booth for the business.
Still very religious and always trying to help her kids, some now young adults she’d worked with for years, naturally her social network included people living on the edge of homelessness; people involved in the drug trade and struggling with addictions; guns and prostitution were not uncommon. Somewhere in this social circle, now mid-1990s, Allie hooked up with a guy and conceived a child. Her old family and friends had met a handful of Allie’s youth advocacy social network, she'd brought several of them home for the family Christmas, and we'd met some of her new church friends as well, but we never met the father of her child or got his story. And Allie was never forthcoming about him.
But Salome, her newborn, provided another rebirth for Allie and was a tremendous blessing to her by all appearances. It focused Allie’s attention. In addition to the craft gift work, she found a place to live, managing a rooming house in the U-District. She managed the house, made new friends, invited people over, family, old friends and new friends, and all without turning her living situation into another homeless shelter plagued by police interventions. And not only did she effectively manage the place but ingratiated herself enough with her landlord to find more paying work with his businesses. It wasn’t living in luxury, more like by a shoestring, but she was supporting herself and created a warm safe home for her daughter.
And this was also another very creative period for Allie. She began working with clay again, making small, eccentric, funny figurines. She made quilts; one for me with a mural depicting a city on fire. She hosted big dinners where she made huge batches of chiIe rellenos. She made mixtapes of her favorite rap music; Outkast, Geto Boys, EP-40, etc. After Public Enemy or De La Soul, personal favorites, I was ignoring the gangsterish hiphop schtick but Allie brought me back into the fold, and I played her mixtapes all the time in the 1990s.
Once in a while I heard about conflicts, problem tenants, in the rooming house she managed and some of the old issues for Allie loomed. A new tenant would turn into a problem that Allie had to negotiate, bound to happen in a rooming house under any circumstances. I never heard of any outcome worse than someone had to move out but in heat of these conflicts she’d invariably refer to the bad tenant as a “witch,” as if because she couldn’t get along with them they were obviously working for Satan. But these situations were rare and mostly she seemed to manage the house with a friendly touch. Several housemates during this time, in fact, became lasting friends.
Or everything seemed fine until it wasn’t fine. Some new instability entered Allie’s life in the rooming house in the middle 2000s. The landlord was talking about selling the house where she lived with Salome, who was then 9 or 10. He, apparently, was offering Allie a similar position in a rental he owned in Tacoma but Allie didn’t want to move to Tacoma and, increasingly, seemed determined to break with her landlord and boss for good. For at least a year she still lived in the rooming house but amidst a pile of packed boxes ready to be moved. She knew she had to move but she didn’t know where: “God would provide,” was about the only thing concerned family could get out of her.
When she finally had to move out because the house had been sold she left her daughter with her grandparents, presumably until she had found a new home but communication with Allie deteriorated fast during this time. She didn’t have a phone or any easy way to be reached. She lived in motels and, by later reports, in homeless camps. When anyone could get ahold of her and ask about her plans her responses were vague; again, “God would provide.” When the parents finally tried to return Salome to Allie living in a hotel on Aurora in Seattle, hoping this would re-focus her attention as it had before, Allie then sent her daughter to live with a friend and her family who lived in Las Vegas. And then when this didn’t work out Salome returned to her grandparents.
Eventually, if briefly, lasting only a couple of months, Allie then moved in with her parents and daughter, who were then living more or less full-time near Bend, OR. But Allie was reportedly now frequently combative, wanted to hostilely interrogate the school her parents were sending Salome to. (Until this time Allie had tried to homeschool Salome.) The nightly news frequently triggered Allie into angry rants. In one final blowout my parents told Allie she had to stop losing her temper and screaming at them or leave. Allie left on foot with Salome, issuing threatening epithets. The cops were called. They talked to Allie but there were no grounds for stopping them.
The parents then reported them as missing persons in Oregon. I did the same in Washington. My parents eventually heard from an uncle, my dad’s brother, that Allie had stopped by his place at Newport, along the Oregon coast. And we learned later that they traveled down the coast into California. But during this time, for a year or more, we had no communication from them and no way to find them and no idea what had happened to them. We feared the worst.
Finally, they showed up at my work one day, standing at the door of my classroom, Allie looking for the first time to me very sick, her eyes vacant and glassy, and her 12-13 year-old daughter doing all the talking. After offering to take her to see a doctor as soon as I was finished with my classes they stormed off in a huff. By the time I found them again, several months later, searching court documents with the help of a friend, they had landed again with the craft business owner, and Allie had left and took off again. The craft gift owner then filed for custody of Salome.
It was now finally clear to all concerned that Allie was experiencing some kind of extreme mental health crisis and breakdown. But no clearer as to how any of us could help her. We filed missing person reports, again. Although we didn’t think to file a report with California or any other states. Through this whole ordeal we’d never heard anything since our first missing person filings. Nor after finally tracking down Salome were we even notified about her custody case, although the Deposition specified that such family contacts should be made, and I lived in the same city, worked at the same Seattle high school, and had the same Seattle phone number I’d had for years. At any rate, we’d given up any hope that government human services could or would help us.
We did eventually track down Salome on our own but never heard from Allie again. From around 2009 until 2022! I'd assumed in despair at her loss that Allie had died homeless on the road. With time I began to think about that last crazy period-- two-three years, 2006-09, the last year she lived out of packed boxes in the U-District through the weird sporadic contact with her over the next two years before she disappeared for good-- like Allie knew something terrible was happening to her, could not or would not talk about it with us, had, on her third try, found a safe home for her daughter and wandered off to die like an old person in some traditional culture, no longer able to fulfill their role in their community.
The Medical examiner that tracked us down after she passed in February 2022 said that she was loved by all the staff in the shelters where she had stayed in San Diego. The examiner didn’t know how long she had been in San Diego but for several years for sure. Expressing some astonishment that we had never heard from her in so long, the Examiner told me Allie never gave shelters accurate contact information. Typically, according to the Examiner, she was a divorced Jewish mother and her husband had abandoned her and taken her kids back to Israel. She was diagnosed by these homeless shelters with paranoid schizophrenia.
Allie leaves behind loving parents, a brother, daughter, and many fond acquaintances and will be missed for the warm, smart, funny, and generous hearted person she was.
Addendum: I put together-- mind you, from boxes of photos accumulated by my parents and almost completely undocumented-- a couple of photo albums about Allie, all works in progress, on Flickr: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAWXkz and https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAWXnP.