The flat she was carried out of

One · What happened

Carried out on a stretcher on 23 September

On 23 September police cordoned off a street, the AP reported. Maricarmen, formally María del Carmen Abascal, a wheelchair user in fragile health, was carried out of her Madrid apartment on a stretcher. She had lived there for about seven decades. Her parents and her brother had shared the apartment with her at first, and both parents died there. The building belonged to a real estate company that, by the AP’s account, evicted her to rent the place for much more. The report does not name the company. In the AP’s words the company “eventually caved in under immense public pressure” and agreed to let her return. The Madrid Tenants’ Union said the solution came too late and called the situation “entirely avoidable.”

Maricarmen died on Wednesday, 7 October, in the hospital where she had been taken after the eviction, the AP reported. Housing activists announced the death, and her lawyer, Beatriz Duro, confirmed it to Cadena Ser radio. Duro did not say what she died of. She did say, in the AP’s account, that the case “leaves us the image of the shameful violence of these types of evictions.” Neither the AP nor NBC News gave a cause of death. Anyone who wants a cause has to wait for whoever holds her records.

“Maricarmen lives, the fight goes on!” protesters chanted outside Parliament, the AP reported. In Madrid’s Puerta del Sol others held a minute of silence for her. Televised images of the eviction sent thousands of people into the streets of Madrid and other cities, and Spain’s unions announced a general strike for next month. On Monday Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called an early election for 29 November. His government’s emergency housing measures had failed in Parliament the week before. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the Popular Party, asked for respect and said, “No campaign, no party, no use for political advantage.” Sánchez wrote on X, “All my love to Maricarmen’s family and loved ones.” How Spain should set its rents, and who answers for the housing package that failed, are questions for Spanish voters and for Spain’s courts. The question left for a reader abroad is a smaller one.

Two · What it is doing

Whose death it is, a day later

At breakfast a man reads the AP report and reaches the chant outside Parliament, “Maricarmen lives, the fight goes on!” One reader who favors the strike hears love for a dead woman. Another, who opposes the strike, hears a rally held over a death and takes Feijóo’s “no use for political advantage” for plain decency. Each has stopped mourning her and started grading the people who claim to.

The AP report names no person at the company that owned the building. Without a name, a real estate firm gets a face quickly, because any landlord the reader has resented is available to wear it. Anger of that kind feels like a verdict and asks only for a target. Nobody quoted in the report says what the people at the company knew of her health or thought of her. The motives a reader assigns them come from him.

The third pull has no side. A man whose mother is eighty-seven reads that Maricarmen used a wheelchair and that both her parents died in the apartment she was carried out of, and his mind goes to his mother’s building. He thinks of whose name is on her lease. He dreads a morning with his mother in a doorway and strangers on the stairs. Nothing Spain’s parliament does on 29 November will settle that morning for him.

Three · Where the ground is

A widow at the gate of Nain

Luke tells of a funeral at the gate of Nain, a town in Galilee, where a widow walked behind the bier of her only son with a large crowd from the town around her. “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep’” (Luke 7:13). Jesus touched the bier and told the dead man to arise. The young man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother (Luke 7:14–15).

“That you may not grieve as others do who have no hope,” Paul told Christians in Thessalonica who had buried members of their church (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Paul rested that hope on the gospel, “since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:14). Her faith appears in neither report. A Christian can say that a death in the news stands under the same Lord as a death in a house, and that the promise of Christ belongs to everyone who trusts him.

A man who wanted a ruling

“Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me,” a man in a crowd called out to Jesus, who answered, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” (Luke 12:13–14). Two brothers were at odds over an inheritance, and Jesus declined to say which of them was right. In James 4:12 a refusal of the same kind goes to Christians who had begun judging one another, “But who are you to judge your neighbor?” A reader of the report is invited to rule on a stranger’s eviction.

Her doctors can say if the eviction played any part. Nicodemus put the rule to the chief priests and Pharisees, “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” (John 7:51). A charge against the company under Spanish law belongs in a court where the company can be heard. A reader who already has a cause of death in mind has given a verdict before anyone has been heard.

David on the widow and the home

“Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation,” David wrote, and he went on, “God settles the solitary in a home” (Psalm 68:5–6). Jesus told his disciples at the last supper, “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” as he began to speak of going to prepare a place for them (John 14:2). Neither line promises an affordable rent or a stay on any eviction. Both lines give a reader something to hold when the news offers him nothing else.

Paul wrote to the Romans that “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The man angry at landlords and the man angry at the mourners are both among those sinners. Christ died for each of them on the same terms. Both can sit down at one table on the strength of that verse alone.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Someone with a lump in his throat and no settled view on Spain’s housing law has five jobs this week, each of them done with his hands or his voice.

1. 01

   Hold anything you share about her to what was reported.

   Before you post or repeat a word about Maricarmen, reread the Associated Press report and delete any sentence of yours that says more than it does. The cause of death is the sentence most likely to need deleting, since her lawyer gave none. Paul told the Ephesians to “let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor” (Ephesians 4:25). Leave the cause blank until her records say what it was.

2. 02

   Take supper to the oldest person you know who lives alone.

   Pick the neighbor or church member in her eighties or nineties. Bring a meal on a weeknight, and stay long enough to ask which stairs trouble her and who keeps a spare key to the door. James wrote of pure religion “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). Tell your pastor what she says she needs.

3. 03

   Ask your mother where she wants to live when the stairs get hard.

   Sit down this week with your mother, or with the oldest relative you would be the one called about. Ask where she would want to live if she could no longer manage alone, and who she would want called first. Find out where the lease or the deed is kept. Write the answers down together. A proverb tells a son, “Listen to your father who gave you life, and do not despise your mother when she is old” (Proverbs 23:22).

4. 04

   Learn from your pastor which family in the church is close to losing a home.

   Put the question to him this week about which household is behind on rent or on a mortgage. Find out what the deacons already have in hand. Offer money or a spare room through the church, so the help comes from people the family knows. In the first church, Luke wrote, “There was not a needy person among them.” Owners of houses and lands sold them and laid the proceeds at the apostles’ feet for distribution to each as any had need (Acts 4:34–35).

5. 05

   Read the story at Nain to someone who has buried a parent.

   Sit with a friend who has lost a mother or a father and read Luke 7:11–17 together. Ask the friend to tell you about the one who died, and listen to the answer. Leave Spain’s rents and its election out of the conversation. Luke records that when the Lord saw the widow he had compassion on her (Luke 7:13).