Two brothers hold a photo of their mother, Cheryl Folden, when she was in high school, younger than they both are now.
In the photo, she is beautiful, a warm smile turning the corners of her eyes. No one likely would have predicted this young woman would end up in a homeless shelter, dependent on crack cocaine.
But Cheryl’s picture-perfect smile doesn’t give away the struggles she was already facing early in her young life.
A survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she said she first experienced homelessness at 17.
She had her first child before graduating high school, and as a new mom, she said the social service workers told her to marry the father if she wanted to be eligible for support.
“What I needed was a counsellor, not a husband,” she said.
There were a lot of ups and downs over the next decades, struggling to keep her two sons out of foster care, working to get them back when they were taken away. Then, after her sons had grown up and left home, after rocky relationships and becoming more and more involved in drugs, couch surfing until her options ran out, she was homeless.
Cheryl moved into the Hamilton Hotel emergency shelter in 2022.
By this time she was heavily addicted to drugs and said she had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. She was on methadone treatment but still also used street drugs. When speaking to the Tribune, she talked about hearing voices and she believed cocaine helped her with these problems.
She was evicted from the shelter for having too much stuff in 2023, and said with nowhere to turn she tried but failed to kill herself with an overdose. She ended up in the hospital and called Stuart Westie, who had befriended Cheryl after meeting her panhandling outside a grocery store on a cold winter day.
Westie offered her a room in his house and by January of 2024, the two were close friends, bickering and giving each other a hard time, but also praising one another in equal measure.
When she first spoke to the Tribune on June 1, 2023, only one week after trying to commit suicide, Cheryl was erratic and scattered. But she was also kind and incredibly grateful and proud of her two sons.
“Anyway, I don’t know how I turned out to have so much love, and my children really love me,” she said. She called them the best thing she’d ever done.
She said her main objective raising them was to give them love and support.
She spoke to the Tribune two times in 2023 because she wanted to be a voice for other vulnerable people living on the street. She wanted to share her story to help others who might be hurt by the system. At the time, she was angry she had been thrown out of the shelter and she was frustrated there was so little in the way of mental health supports.
Four months later, still living in Westie’s spare room, she had improved significantly. Cheryl had gained weight and was more sociable, and Westie said she was thinking about looking at having her teeth fixed.
But on January 8, 2024, Cheryl died at 57 years old after experiencing abdominal pain for a couple of days. She had a doctor’s appointment for the next day.
On April 27, 2024, a room full of people, including her two sons, Jason and Nathan Myhr, and her mother Diana Folden, gathered to remember Cheryl. A street nurse who knew Cheryl from when she lived at the shelter spoke of the special spark Cheryl had. A nephew recalled a story of how Cheryl had once borrowed money from him. When he came back to town for a visit, she heard he was in town and sought him out to make sure to pay him back the $80, which he said he had long forgotten.
Both her sons told the Tribune how they remember their mother as kind and loving.
Nathan had not seen his mom in person since Christmas of 2020.
He said his mom’s ability to empathize with other people really opened up the world for him in ways he is only now fully realizing.
“She’s had friends, family, but never the true support she needed to get through those traumas,” he said. Instead, he said, many times, what should have been her support network was who was hurting her.
He said had he not had the support he found in an adopted father who took in him and his brother, he could have ended up on the street.
Cheryl’s oldest son Jason also remembers their mom as both loving and kind and said Cheryl did the best she could for him and his brother.
“She didn’t put her burden on other people,” he said.
“She taught me love is more powerful than anything you can imagine.”
READ MORE: Cheryl Yvonne Folden
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