Who Remembers the Man Who Walked Home?
Most people know the headline.
Some remember the news stories.
Some remember the public debate.
Some remember the arguments about housing, healthcare, responsibility, and policy.
Some remember the photographs from the hospital.
Some remember the letters.
I remember Cory.
Not the headline.
Not the hospital.
Not the case file.
The man.
The proud Newfoundlander.
The Red Seal carpenter.
The working man.
Cory never wanted to be on welfare.
He never wanted to live in a shelter.
He never wanted charity.
He wanted work.
That’s who he was.
Even when work was slow, he’d get up in the morning, throw a backpack full of tools over his shoulders, and head out looking for jobs.
Those tools weren’t just tools.
They were part of his identity.
They represented years of experience, hard work, and pride in his trade.
Most people never saw that part.
They saw the homeless man.
I saw the carpenter.
Construction work isn’t steady.
Projects get delayed.
Weather changes.
Jobs disappear.
Sometimes you walk home with a full day’s pay.
Sometimes you walk home with nothing.
Then you get up and try again tomorrow.
That’s what Cory did.
One year work slowed down and he fell behind on his rent.
Not by much.
A few hundred dollars.
The kind of amount a working person expects to catch up once the next jobs come in.
He made a handshake agreement with his landlord.
More work was coming.
He’d catch up.
Then he took a roofing job in West Kelowna.
Not because it was Red Seal carpenter work.
Because he needed the money.
Because rent was due.
Because that’s what working people do.
While working on that roof, Cory fell.
Not just off the roof.
He fell from a second-storey roof.
Then he continued falling.
He tumbled down through rocks, brambles, debris, and rough ground below.
The roof fall was bad enough.
The tumble afterward made it worse.
By the time he finally came to a stop, he had fallen two storeys and then another roughly forty feet down the hillside.
He was bruised.
Cut up.
Bleeding.
Hurting.
He ended up at Kelowna General Hospital needing treatment and stitches.
He spent hours there while doctors cleaned wounds, stitched cuts, and patched him back together.
Anyone who knew Cory knows he wasn’t much for pain medication.
He wasn’t much for complaining either.
He’d rather grit his teeth and push through.
Whether that was the smartest thing or not, it was part of who he was.
By the time he was discharged, he didn’t have bus fare.
Someone else might have accepted help.
Cory was too proud.
So he walked home.
Think about that for a moment.
After falling two storeys.
After tumbling another forty feet through rocks and brambles.
After spending hours in Emergency.
He walked home.
Injured.
Sore.
Exhausted.
When he got there, the locks had been changed.
Someone he didn’t know was sitting in his chair watching his television.
His fridge had been stocked with food before he left for work.
Now he couldn’t get to any of it.
Home was gone.
He called me.
I started calling shelters.
There weren’t any beds available.
I told him to come stay with me.
At first he refused.
He was too proud for that too.
For a time he slept outside.
Eventually we got him into Kelowna Gospel Mission.
He stayed there a long time.
More than a year.
Long enough that people stopped asking how he got there.
Long enough that many people began seeing “homeless” before they saw Cory.
Eventually he moved into my one-bedroom apartment.
Two grown men.
Separate beds.
Trying to make the best of a difficult situation.
We cooked meals.
Watched television.
Listened to music.
Shared stories.
Had some laughs.
Had some disagreements.
Had a few beers.
Sometimes a little whiskey.
Sometimes more whiskey than either of us probably should have had.
Cory loved television and movies.
Not just watching them.
Watching them over and over and over again.
M*A*S*H
The Dukes of Hazzard.
Maverick.
I swear he watched Maverick enough times that he practically knew the dialogue by heart.
Sometimes I’d walk into the room and know exactly what was playing before I even looked at the screen.
Sometimes it drove me crazy.
But those shows made him happy.
So did his plastic models.
He could spend hours working on them.
The models, the movies, the Newfoundland music, the stories, the cold beers — they were all part of who he was.
And Cory had stories.
Some unbelievable.
Some true.
One of my favourites was that one of his babysitters growing up had been Stompin’ Tom Connors.
Yes.
That Stompin’ Tom Connors.
The man who wrote The Hockey Song.
Whether he was telling stories, watching MAS*H for the hundredth time, or working on a model kit, that was Cory.
The guy behind the headlines.
The guy behind the shelter bed.
The guy behind the case file.
Through all those years he kept trying to work.
Even as his body started failing him.
Even as carrying those tool bags became harder.
Even as walking became more painful.
Even as his legs began giving him trouble.
He never stopped thinking of himself as a carpenter.
Because that’s what he was.
Eventually an opportunity came along.
STEP Place.
A tiny home.
His own space.
His own door.
His own television.
His own independence.
To many people it was just a small shelter unit.
To Cory it felt like getting a piece of his life back.
I loaned him a television.
Later he bought himself a DVD player.
For a while he seemed happy there.
Then things started changing.
He had more trouble walking.
More pain.
More fatigue.
His abdomen became swollen.
His health continued to decline.
People have theories about why.
Alcohol is often mentioned.
Other possibilities have been suggested.
Even the doctors never seemed completely certain.
What became certain was that he was getting sicker.
Friends noticed.
Advocates noticed.
Questions were asked.
Calls were made.
Emails were sent.
People tried to help.
Then came the hospital.
The headlines.
The public debate.
The arguments about housing, healthcare, responsibility, and policy.
Those discussions matter.
But they are not what I think about when I remember Cory.
I think about the carpenter carrying his tools.
I think about the proud Newfoundlander who wanted to earn his own way.
I think about the guy watching M*A*S*H and The Dukes of Hazzard.
I think about Maverick playing again when everyone else in the room had already seen it enough times.
I think about model kits spread across a table.
I think about Newfoundland music.
Stories told for the tenth time as if they were the first.
And I think about the man who walked home.
One thing people should know is this:
Cory did not die alone.
Melissa had known him for more than a decade.
At one time they had been a couple.
Over the years they remained connected through friendship, concern, and shared history.
When the end came, Melissa stayed.
She slept on a stretcher in his hospital room.
She remained there through the long hours.
She remained there when there was nothing left to do but be present.
And she remained there until his final spark left his body and went wherever such sparks go.
No policy can measure that.
No report can capture it.
No statistic can explain it.
I also have a George Thorogood T-shirt Cory gave me.
It’s worn now.
It has a few holes in it.
Most people would probably throw it away.
I won’t.
Every time I see it, I think about Cory.
I think about the movies.
The music.
The stories.
The beers.
The arguments.
The laughter.
The years when we shared a small apartment and tried to help each other through difficult times.
To anyone else, it’s just an old T-shirt.
To me, it’s Cory.
Because the most important thing about Cory was never that he became homeless.
The most important thing about Cory was that he was a person.
A carpenter.
A friend.
A storyteller.
A proud Newfoundlander.
A stubborn man.
A hardworking man.
A flawed man.
A man who mattered.
Who remembers the man who walked home?
I do.
Melissa does.
His family does.
And I hope, after reading this, you do too.
Author’s Note: This piece was largely written during the afternoon and early evening of June 7, 2026 while staying at a shelter in Kelowna.
Earlier that day, I spent several hours sitting in an alley with a woman who had recently lost her shelter bed and was trying to figure out what came next.
As we sat talking, a group of young people from different churches arrived. They were not representing a single organization. They had simply come together to hand out water, hot dogs, and soft drinks to people experiencing homelessness.
They offered prayers to those who wanted them, but did not pressure anyone to participate.
Mostly, they listened.
We spent nearly two hours talking.
About homelessness.
About faith.
About life.
About the realities people face when housing disappears.
The woman stayed for part of those conversations.
Eventually she left.
With nowhere else to go, she planned to sleep rough that night.
As evening approached, I returned to the shelter.
Someone had saved me a plate for supper.
While I was eating, another resident was searching online for information about tiny homes.
Suddenly she looked up from her phone, pointed at the screen, and excitedly said:
“That’s you! That’s you!”
She had unexpectedly found the Global News story about Cory Hyde.
It was a strange moment.
Only hours earlier I had been writing about a man who died after a long struggle with housing instability, illness, and homelessness.
Now, entirely by accident, someone who had never known Cory had found his story.
Perhaps it was coincidence.
Perhaps it was timing.
Perhaps it was simply a reminder that stories continue travelling long after we think they are finished.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that, for a brief moment, Cory’s story appeared again in an unexpected place.
A woman searching for information about tiny homes found a story about a man who never got the chance to grow old in one.
While writing a piece asking who remembers the man who walked home, one more person found him.
Correction
7:30 p.m., June 10, 2026
An earlier version of this dispatch referenced Cory’s enjoyment of Maverick. After publication, I realized the film we had discussed was actually Top Gun: Maverick.
While this correction does not alter the substance of the story, accuracy matters—especially when writing about someone who can no longer speak for themselves. Cory was more than the circumstances of his final days. He was a carpenter, a storyteller, a man with strong opinions, familiar routines, and favourite films.
This dispatch has been updated to reflect that correction.
— Randy Millis
7:30 p.m., June 10, 2026
—-
Support Personal Dispatches
If you found value in this story, you can learn more about supporting Personal Dispatches here: