Barry Maahsen remembers his friend not looking well. Something was off.

He’d arranged for the two to meet for coffee over the summer in Santa Rosa. They caught up. They laughed a little. The usual.

What was not usual was her request before they parted. Could he give her a lift home?

Maahsen remembers thinking that was strange. It was barely more than a quarter of a mile. She walked farther than that every day. And she never headed home so early. But he agreed.

“I gave her some money like I usually do and told her I’d see her in a few weeks,’” he said. “She said, ‘OK, I’m just not feeling that good.’ It was like somebody who had a cold.”

The following week, the phone rang in his subsidized apartment in south Petaluma. The stranger on the other end of the line was from a Sonoma County administration office. He had retrieved Maahsen’s number from his friend’s phone. He said he hoped Maahsen could help him. Bewildered, Maahsen kept listening.

The caller explained that Maahsen’s friend, who had been living on the streets for years, had been found deceased in the Santa Rosa park where she had made her home.

It was a gut punch, learning from a stranger that his friend was dead. No foul play was suspected, the man on the phone said. But officials had questions.

The key question? “We are trying to find out what her real name was.”

The 59-year-old woman had been found unresponsive in Steele Lane Park on June 26, just after 12:30 p.m. She was one of the approximately 150 deaths in Sonoma County each year in which the deceased has no apparent family.

The woman had lived on the streets. She held no job. She had no pet, no partner, no identification. She was, it seemed, living almost entirely outside of the system. But this woman was far from anonymous.

She was Grace.

At a time when the issue of housing insecurity continues to frustrate citizens and public officials, and when others living on the street seek shelter in discreet, darkened corners away from the judgments of passersby and law enforcement, Grace lived unapologetically in the open. Her home was Steele Lane Park, a small, well-used, 2.4-acre city park in the heart of Santa Rosa.

Over a period of three years, her space in the park grew to include a six-person tent, a grill and a cooler. When those items were confiscated by Santa Rosa Police, she made do with far simpler accommodations — a sleeping bag, a piece of cardboard and an ever-present satchel that held her art supplies and Bible.

Neighbors, as that’s what Grace considered them, allowed her to store some of her things on their porch in inclement weather. One offered her use of an outdoor bathtub and did her laundry once a week. Multiple people spoke of giving Grace a tent over the years.

Dozens of relationships — real ones with highs and lows — developed during Grace’s time at the park. Many others considered her a friendly acquaintance, someone with whom they regularly shared passing greetings.

Visit Peet’s Coffee on Mendocino Avenue or the Starbucks in Mendocino Marketplace and you were almost guaranteed to run into her. Grace became even more well known in the spring of 2023 when I wrote about her for The Press Democrat newspaper.

In interviews, Grace spoke of growing up in Dutchess County, New York, of her beloved mother “Sissy,” of losing two brothers too young.

She said she had been well educated, a career woman who was also deeply unfulfilled. She described herself as cast adrift when her mother died. She spoke openly of her descent into homelessness— but also of her embrace of the lifestyle.

And she spoke of finding God and of serving her community. Our community.

But much of what she said in interviews, much of the story she told her countless friends and acquaintances in Sonoma County, is difficult to corroborate. Her use of multiple names over time makes it nearly impossible.

To me, to friends and neighbors, to the baristas in the coffee shops and the clerks at Safeway, she was best known as Grace. She also used the name Ellynn. And Qua. She answered to all three names at different times and with different people.

But who was she?

Grace’s story in Sonoma County — and we will call her Grace in this story because it is the name she was most known by — starts largely with Barry Maahsen, the friend who took her to coffee and left her with some money the week before she died.

Grace was new to Santa Rosa and living on the street when Maahsen met her. He thinks the year was 2018.

Maahsen, a lifelong member of a commune known as One World Family, was living with three others in a rented home on Sleepy Hollow Drive in Santa Rosa when Grace walked through the door.

Maahsen didn’t know her as Grace. He called her El.

“El was short for Ellynn,” he said. “Ellynn Grace Cole was what she told us her name was. Other people called her Grace Davis. I never knew her as that.”

One of Maahsen’s roommates had struck up a conversation with Grace at Peet’s Coffee and later invited her to live with them and help care for an elderly member of the commune. There was no pay, but her room and board were provided. “We lived by the axiom, ‘Hold all things common, distribute each according to need,’” Maahsen said.

Grace’s new accommodations were modest, but her needs were met. She slept in what Maahsen described as an alcove with no door.

But over time, the situation frayed. “I would have liked it if she would have tried to support herself with food stamps or something or welfare or whatever, but then she’d have to have ID or whatever and I think that is what stopped her from doing it,” said Maahsen. “For some reason, she didn’t want to.”

In conversations last year, Grace told me that the idea of living with three members of the commune sounded good to her in theory, but that in reality, she felt thrust in the middle of decades of tension between the roommates.

“Living in that home humbled me,” she said. She knew two of the three roommates voted to evict her, with only Maahsen advocating that she stay. But rather than leave voluntarily, she stayed until the police knocked on the door.

“She knew it was coming. She got a notice, at the house,” Maahsen said. “Two big police officers came and she grabbed her stuff and she left.”

I asked Maahsen what she took with her.

“Just what she could carry,” he said. “She never had more than she could carry.”

It’s telling that Grace and Maahsen remained friends. They continued to meet up for coffee, go shopping and spend afternoons together until days before Grace’s death.

Last year, when I asked Grace about leaving the home, she didn’t go into detail.

“When I had it all, God strips you bare,” she said. “He strips you bare.”

More than just her living arrangement changed on the day Ellynn “El” Grace Cole walked out of the shared house on Sleepy Hollow Drive and headed to Steele Lane Park.

When she returned to the street, she was friendly and outgoing, engaging in easy conversation. She talked with everyone.

But now she always introduced herself as Grace.

Neighbors who live around Steele Lane Park in Santa Rosa remember first seeing Grace in the winter of 2019. She spent days there, sitting on a rock near the park’s large, wooden sign. She would draw. She would read. She would engage with passersby.

But in those early days, it wasn’t obvious that she was spending her nights there.

After the pandemic turned the world upside down in the spring of 2020, Grace took advantage of prohibitions against sweeps of homeless encampments and set down roots, creating a home at the entrance to the park. For a time, a Google Street View of Schurman Drive featured a photo of Grace sitting in a chair and talking with a friend, surrounded by her belongings.

In those early days, some asked her to leave. She refused.

At the time, due to the pandemic, people were discouraged from gathering, even in parks. So Grace had the place largely to herself. She described finding a sense of peace. “When I first started sleeping there, I was exhausted,” Grace told me in 2023.

In time, Grace was accepted. And still later, embraced.

Neighbors credited her with helping monitor the small park, preventing open air drug use and littering and discouraging others from parking their vehicles for long periods. And her neighbors, her community, dubbed her “Amazing Grace.”

For three years, a Santa Rosa Police spokesman said the department recorded not a single complaint related to Grace. One neighbor said he refused to call the police about other unsavory activity at the park because he was afraid it would negatively affect Grace.

And Grace, imbued with natural confidence, believed that she had the right to live there. She’d earned it, she told me. Grace was so resolute in her position there that she left her valuables in and around her tent for hours at a time, spending her days in coffee shops, drawing and socializing.

She cherished the community she had built but was unafraid to flout its norms. She was described as an artist. A philosopher. A neighbor.

But also a conundrum.

She could be prickly. She would sometimes share theories that bordered on conspiracy, sharing links to videos about the dangers of antidepressant medications and vaccinations. She sent me videos suggesting that anarchists were ruining cities like Seattle and Portland. But she also sent an incomplete transcript of George Washington’s farewell speech and a link to a George Carlin stand-up set.

She had no time for public health addiction programs that focused on harm reduction. She regularly called efforts to lift up the unhoused as a massive government con job. She had harsh words for most of the folks who lived on the street.

“If they stopped getting high, most of them would have places to go,” Grace told me last year. “It’s not a homeless problem. It’s a drug problem and it’s an alcohol problem. There are people wanting to be out there. They have been given chance after chance after chance.”

I pushed back. What if people in crisis or in the throes of addiction need support? Need someone to walk alongside them to get clean?

“You can walk side by side with them but watch your pockets,” she said. “You can lead a horse to water but if that horse wants to do crack…” In 2022, an officer with the Santa Rosa-Sonoma County NAACP tried to link Grace with supports: financial assistance, therapy, transportation. The two had struck up a conversation at a coffee shop, according to NAACP branch president Kirstyne Lange.

Over the course of three to four months, there were discussions about how best to support Grace, including trying to get her a laptop. But it wasn’t easy. Grace seemed both willing and wary. “I wouldn’t call it resistance, but there was hesitation,” Lange said.

On top of that, there were practical issues. “I remember she didn’t have anything that could prove her identity or prove her living situation,” Lange said. “I would say the perception was that it felt like too much trouble, the questions, the paperwork. I think that it really felt strenuous.”

And then Grace “kind of disappeared,” Lange said. The phone she was using became unreliable. The NAACP officer eventually reconnected with her but was never able to link Grace with the services they had discussed, Lange said.

Then, in April 2023, Grace’s life was upended.

Sonoma County opened a sanctioned homeless camp on Ventura Avenue, near the park. Days later, officers from the Santa Rosa Police Department posted an eviction warning on Grace’s tent, and two days later, her belongings were removed and placed in police storage. Neighbors believed Grace’s home was collateral damage in local efforts to monitor activity in the wake of the sanctioned camp.

Left with only the bag she had carried to the coffee shop, Grace refused to retrieve her belongings, not even her Bible and art supplies. They took them, she explained, and they can return them.

At the same time, she was friendly and personal with law enforcement officers of multiple agencies. Despite a mistrust of the government, she had faith that Jesus would take care of her. She repeatedly said she had no plan, she simply followed Jesus.

“I’m doing what God tells me to do,” she told me. “It’s amazing.”

After Grace was evicted from Steele Lane Park, her physical footprint became smaller. With no tent, no cooler, no sleeping bag, she disappeared from the park for a while. The phone number I had for her stopped working. I could still find her at Peet’s, but our communication slowed considerably.

I ran into her at Safeway last winter. We walked the aisles together. I bought her a beer and a prepared salad. I noticed she didn’t look well. Her coloring was off. Others, too, told me after her death that she, off and on, showed signs of struggling. Closer to her death, people said she had a cough that wouldn’t let go.

But Grace was Grace. A strong personality, a strong woman. It was hard to imagine her weakened by much.

When Grace was evicted from the park, neighbor Vicky Kumpfer took her in, allowing her to stay in her backyard yurt. Their relationship was real in that it had highs and lows. They had a couple of disagreements over issues of trust. But, as true friends do, they came back together.

They had just mended one of those rifts last spring when Kumpfer, who works as an art consultant, convinced Grace, with some prodding, to show her art publicly. Kumpfer had eight pieces of Grace’s work and was in the early stages of planning a small show when Grace died.

Instead of planning an art exhibition, Kumpfer planned a memorial service. She set a time and got the word out the best she could. It would be held at the park, at the spot where Grace had slept for years.

She assumed neighbors would come, but didn’t know who else.

On a Wednesday afternoon two weeks after Grace died, Kumpfer set up a table and a few chairs, brought fruit and sparkling water. She also brought Racer 5 IPA, which prompted someone to recall aloud the time they tried to buy Grace a Modelo and she declined. She preferred IPA.

About 40 people showed up. Neighbors, yes. But also a retired opera singer who lives in Fountaingrove with her husband. A maintenance worker at Santa Rosa Junior College who took time off from his shift to attend. A special education teacher at a nearby school. A doctor and his wife who live miles from the park. A middle-aged woman who brought her daughter and who could not stop crying.

A man set up an electronic keyboard and played live music. People sang. People wept. People pinned messages to the fence that for years had provided Grace shelter.

“What surprised me was the diversity of the people,” Kumpfer said.

The day before the memorial service, Sonoma County’s chief deputy Public Administrator, Guardian and Conservator, Jennifer Hainstock, emailed me. Her office, Hainstock said, was charged with trying to find Grace’s family, and failing that, identify someone willing to make final arrangements for her.

In the case of deaths where there is no obvious family connection, Hainstock’s office culls information from newspaper stories, social media accounts, online databases. They make calls, they send emails, they write letters.

“We end up with about 45 people a year we just can’t find anybody for,” she said. “Or we find them, and they are, for whatever reason — no money, don’t want the ashes —  unwilling.”

Hainstock’s office had not yet found family for Grace. The names they were using in their searches were Ellynn Grace Cole, aka Qua Grace Davis.

In 2023, the Santa Rosa Police Department had her name as Elgrace Cole. At the same time, Grace told me her name was Qua Grace Davis.

When I asked her then about the discrepancy, she told me that at some point she decided she didn’t like people using Qua. Her mom called her that, she said.

She said she “came up with” Ellynn, but didn’t say why. She said it was Barry Maahsen who affectionately shortened it to “El.”

With no identification, the name Grace offered officials at some point in her seven years here is the name that came up when the coroner’s office ran her fingerprints after her death.

It’s the name that appears on her death certificate along with an official cause of death: acute bacterial lobar pneumonia.

The coroner’s office took a DNA sample but did not run it through any database, because a match was found with fingerprints. An additional DNA inquiry would be expensive, said Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Rob Dillion.

To have fingerprints turn up in a law enforcement search does not automatically mean the person had a criminal history. Fingerprints can be gleaned from things like the federal Transportation Security Administration files. Or if a person volunteers at a school. Or is a youth coach. “Just because her fingerprints are ‘in the system’ doesn’t mean it’s negative,” Dillion said.

But the name Ellynn Grace Cole?

“The fingerprint that came back to us as a match, that was the name she gave,” he said. “It doesn’t say when that was.”

There might be a reasonable explanation for this. Searches are only as good as the information put into them, Dillion explained. For someone born before the internet age, when official documents were filed on paper, not everything has been moved to an electronic database. Not everything can be found in a “search.”

I also searched for Ellynn Grace Cole. And Grace Davis. And Qua Grace Davis.

And I looked for her mother, too. I called administrators in the Dutchess County N.Y. Records Room as well as New York state’s Vital Records office. I reached out to Vassar College, where Grace said she’d earned a degree. Officials there could find no record of Ellynn Grace Cole, Qua Grace Davis or Grace Davis. I also contacted officials at Marist College, where Grace said she’d worked. Again, nothing.

Which isn’t to say she did not work at Marist or earn a degree from Vassar, just that she didn’t do so with any of the names she used in Sonoma County.

Database searches in a slew of categories — deeds, mortgages, liens, assumed names — found nothing for the three names Grace used here in Sonoma County. I sent a Facebook friend request to someone named Ellynn Cole whose profile picture looked eerily like Grace’s style of painting, but whose public list of friends seemed to be filled with bots. No reply.

I sent messages via Facebook to two real-seeming friends of that “Ellynn Cole” explaining who I was trying to find. No reply.

When I ran the Social Security number listed on Grace’s death certificate through a search tool used by reporters, it returned a 59-year-old woman in Staten Island with a name not remotely close to any used by Grace.

I called her.

She didn’t let me finish my question before cutting me off and hanging up.

So I wrote her a letter, explaining the mystery. I told her a Social Security number associated with a now-deceased woman in California is also linked to her. I sent her a copy of our original story about Grace.

I never heard from her.

And as I searched, I fretted over what role I had played in what could at best be described as a local mystery, but at worst a lie. I’d been unable to confirm much of Grace’s story, so I allowed it to be told through her voice and through the voices of her community.

Those friends and neighbors spoke of Grace’s emotional intelligence and her almost eerie ability to read people. They spoke of her humor as well as her temper. Of her resilience and good cheer in the face of daunting circumstances.

Many of Grace’s friends described her as an outlier, different from other unhoused people — not necessarily part of the divisive debate about how to handle the approximately 2,500 people living unhoused in this county.

Sure, she lived on the street, but she was always well-dressed, she was clean, she was respectful and engaging.

She was different.

But our society and our system of governance is not set up for different. Rules and policies are crafted for the many, not the few.

People like Grace complicate the debate.

Jennifer Hainstock at the county administrative offices didn’t have success locating Grace’s relatives either. Neighbor Vicky Kumpfer agreed to pay $1,800 for Grace to be cremated and take possession of her ashes. If she hadn’t, a county fund would have been used and the ashes would have been laid to rest in Pleasant Hills Memorial Park in Sebastopol.

There would have been no personalized marker, no name at all. That was unacceptable to Kumpfer. “It was to see that she not go in an unmarked grave, if you will,” she said. “I figured she deserved more.”

Kumpfer held a second memorial service. She again set up a table with fruit and sparkling water, cheese and crackers, and a berry pie. At the back of the table was a black, rectangular container roughly the size of a shoe box with a tightly wrapped bag of ashes inside. The sticker on the front read:

Ellynn Grace Cole

DOB: 8/14/1964

DOD: 6/26/2024

Kumpfer brought brightly colored bags and poured a small amount of Grace’s ashes into bags for those who wanted them. Donations from Grace’s friends reimbursed Kumpfer for the cost of the cremation.

The contributions brought Kumpfer to tears. “I couldn’t handle it. The stories they would have. Short stories in terms of interactions with her, allowing them to express their love for her was a really big part of it.”

Stories.

Grace told us a story of who she was. And in her telling and in the way she lived, we saw in her who we needed her to be.

In interviews with more than 20 people over the course of 18 months, people who knew Grace repeated the same details. She grew up on the East Coast. She was well educated. She’d been devastated by the death of her mother and was a somewhat recent follower of Jesus.

But were the stories she told us about her mother and brothers, her education, her journey west, true? And, perhaps more importantly, does it matter?

Or is her impact on her community — the connections she made here, the way she lived her life and forged relationships with people — the real story?

To the art collector who paid for a stone Grace painted, does it matter if the name she signed on the back was not her given name? To the woman wrestling with the pain of a destructive relationship, is Grace’s wise counsel diminished in any way if that was not her true name? Does the courtesy clerk at Safeway who unburdened her cares about her mother’s mental health issues to a woman she called Grace gain less solace if that in fact was not her name?

And are the countless, truly countless, folks who walked through Steele Lane Park or met her at a coffee shop any less enriched by the conversations they had if she chose to go by a name other than the one given to her at birth six decades ago?

Grace lived as she wanted to and told us her story as she wanted it to be told. No more, no less.

And in turn, we poured our own needs onto her, making her who we needed her to be.

In death, Grace’s story ends. This is what she left us.

It’s a story. And it’s a good one.