Man describes what led him to Pathways and what led him out
Jeremiah Moynihan. Donated photo
It’s tough for a person to get back up on their feet, no matter how well they may have done in the past. Such was the case for Jeremiah Moynihan, a Florida man who after living in Western North Carolina for the last several years found himself sick and homeless with nowhere to turn.
That’s when Haywood Pathways Center provided a way out of an impossible situation.
Moynihan, 47, is originally from the Orlando area. He grew up in a pseudo-religious environment as his mother was Jehovah’s Witness and his father was a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang.
“It made me a really weird person in that I thought that I could do these wild things, but then I could get up Saturday morning and go preach and try to save people,” he said.
While Moynihan turned away from that religion, he said that it did give him specific gifts he’s been able to carry through life, including the ability to talk to a variety of people about a variety of things.
He has lived all around the country as a traveling carpenter. He said the trade came naturally to him, although his entry into it may have been a bit unorthodox. He first began to consider it may be a natural fit when was already bigger than his father at 12 years old.
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“I could pick him up, and he said, ‘you’re going to work, dude; I can’t afford to feed you,’” Moynihan recalled.
By the time he was in his late teens, Moynihan became a bona fide finish carpenter. Before long, in the late 1990s, he hired a crew and was working union jobs in New York City. Within a few years, Moynihan found himself in Southern California applying his trade. Things were good for a while and the jobs kept coming, but then around 2008, the bubble burst and work dried up.
“I ended up back on the road, which I promised my wife I wouldn’t do, but I had to pay the bills,” he said. “We got divorced in 2012.”
At that point, Moynihan returned to his home state of Florida, where he did a fair amount of work for Disney while running his own company. Although he was proud of his ability to ply his trade, he admitted that he didn’t have much of a mind for business. His crew was up to about 25 workers, but he realized he wasn’t making any money. Instead, he was just making enough money to fund the next job. He downsized and found more success, although he still didn’t love living out of a suitcase as he traveled throughout the state to work.
Then the pandemic hit, and the world hit the emergency brake. While there’s a perception that Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, didn’t shut down, Moynihan said that’s not true. Especially considering much of his work was with Disney and the park shut down, he couldn’t find the jobs he was used to, and he didn’t have much money saved up. Things got worse when he got COVID and couldn’t work at all for an extended period.
Then came the knockout punch. While he was getting treated for COVID, doctors noticed that Moynihan’s T-cell count had spiked, so they ran more tests and discovered he had mesothelioma, a form of cancer typically associated with exposure to asbestos, a fiber that used to be used in construction due to its flame-retardant properties.
Moynihan said his cancer is now at stage 2, meaning it hasn’t reached his lymph nodes, and he is undergoing immunotherapy.
With all Moynihan was enduring, he decided to make a radical change and move up to Asheville, a place he’d enjoyed since he used to visit as a child.
“I’ve always loved it up here,” Moynihan said. “When I was a kid, around 94, I came up to Cashiers and lived up there for a bit. The only real town where I could find trouble was Asheville, and Asheville was so weird back then. It was awesome.”
As thrilled as Moynihan was to find his way to Western North Carolina, he was realizing he was a COVID long hauler and found himself bedridden at Haywood Regional Medical center for three months. Moynihan claimed that during that time his roommate failed to pay the rent on their apartment and instead pocketed the money he’d been given. Following eviction and subsequent civil litigation, Moynihan was left with nowhere to go. He called Pathways and was able to be admitted since he’d lived in the county while he was hospitalized.
“I’m freaked out because of this stigma,” he said. “It’s more humility than I’ve ever had to show. I’m not a humble man. I’ve never been a humble man. Never had a reason to be. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. I had been on my own so long and I’d been my own boss. I’ve been given a lot of blessings, and this was a mindf—- to be honest.”
Pathways has a plethora of rules to protect its staff and residents and to ensure those residents can get the most out of their time there. Moynihan said some rules might seem burdensome, like one that stipulates residents must spend the day off-campus, but his take is a bit different. That kind of structure — wake up at a certain time, breakfast and meds at a certain time, dinner at a certain time — is essential. It might be easy to assume the rule exists because people were sponging off the nonprofit, but Moynihan said it’s worth considering that these people have been so oppressed by some combination of homelessness, addiction and incarceration that they enjoy a chance to just breathe in a safe place where they can shed the shackles of their previous fight-or-flight reality.
Moynihan said he was close to leaving Pathways several times, but illnesses and medical complications kept him bouncing back and forth between there and the hospital.
“That just got beyond frustrating for me,” he said.
All the same, Moynihan said he was happy to be at Pathways and is grateful for the efforts of staff and volunteers to ensure he had that place where he could work on getting back on his feet. Last month, he secured his own housing and left Pathways, and although he’d been working at Pathways for a while, he also recently left that job. He said he’s working on finding full-time steady employment while making some money as a bouncer at the Water’n Hole Bar in Waynesville.
Now that Moynihan has had a chance to reflect on his time at Pathways, he said he’s happy to be out of there but that he’s eternally grateful such a place exists
“One of the things that made pathways so great to me is there was no judging,” he said.
Another thing Moynihan is grateful for is that he hasn’t had to struggle with addiction, as so many who go through Pathways do.
“I’m very lucky,” he said. “I don’t know that battle. I don’t know what it’s like to spend a night on the streets where I’m afraid to sleep because someone could come up and kick my brains in and take my stuff. It happens. I didn’t have to do whatever to try and get my ‘meds,’ just something to take that pain away for a little while.”
Although Moynihan said he’s working on securing employment in Haywood County, he noted that his main goal is to get back to Southern California, where his kids live. Even though he doesn’t like how crowded the cities there are, he feels like that’s where he belongs. If he’s able to take that leap, he’ll know it’s largely because of the fresh beginning afforded by Pathways.
“I feel like I’m a new man,” Moynihan said. “Pathways was a big part of my life, and now I’m withdrawing from it altogether.”
Moynihan’s ultimate message to people in the community who may be skeptical of Pathways is to consider the organization’s mission, who it serves and how close most working-class people may be to needing that service.
“Everyone here is living so close to scraping by that they’re all just a paycheck or two away from being there,” he said. “No one wants to admit that, but that’s the truth.”
