Annie Ayers actually knew the answer to the question she often asked as she quietly went about the exhausting business of making thousands of lives a little better or a lot.
Annie, a steadfast paragon of offering a hand to myriad people who have stumbled or fallen in a harsh world, would often end her account of some calamity inflicted on a client she was helping with a refrain she would sing with a sigh.
“Yeah. But what are you gonna do?”
She mostly knew what to do, and she’d do it.
Annie died last week at 65 after suffering a stroke in January. Aurora will miss her mirth and might.
Raised in Denver, Aurora has been her home and her passion for almost all of her adult life.
Even if you didn’t know Annie, you might have come across some of the work she did for decades as a social worker, a crisis center administrator or a mental health provider. Her work was people.
Annie was intensely respectful of the thousands of those she worked with who had no home, no money, no grip on reality and no way to make any of that change.
At the same time, she was sublimely irreverent. Sometimes shocking to those who don’t work in police departments, emergency rooms, crisis centers and newsrooms, it’s an infectious quality shared by people working in the trenches of horror and despair.
Her drollery was delivered with her measured Denver drawl, a part of Colorado that’s disappearing as fast as our once famous friendliness and penchant for instant camaraderie.
I knew Annie before I knew her. I worked with her husband, Jim Ayers, in a west side newsroom. He was a desk editor. Jim was a proud young dad who shared Annie’s penchant for parody.
During an office Christmas desk-decorating contest, Jim created Barbie’s Holiday House of Ill-repute at his workstation, complete with flashing lights and his daughter’s Barbies, in various spurious predicaments, all inside a copy paper box fashioned into a motel. Jim pointed out the inspirations provided by Annie, his wife.
I liked her even more when I met her as a reporter covering all that makes Aurora weird and wonderful.
Along the way of pounding out a few million words about people who desperately needed to escape an abusive spouse or stop selling sex for meth or just find peace from relentless delusion, I met a cadre of people who do something about all those horrors, rather than just talk about doing something.
Because Aurora, like so many large cities, has long had a history of more people in desperate situations than ways to help them, I kept coming across people like Annie, Di Utesch, Cindy Bohl and Margee Cannon.
Di was a powerhouse at what was then the Gateway Battered Women’s Shelter. She got stuff done, and thousands of women were saved from a lifetime of terror because of it. Cindy was a publicist for Aurora “Prez,” a hospital later swallowed by corporate stuff. She became much of the voice and face of Aurora Mental Health Center and was a staunch proponent of getting help for people who had no way out of their situations. Margee was a neighborhood liaison for the city, a relentless do-gooder and an irreverent complement to Annie’s free flowing sarcasm.
Somehow, all of us created The Mini-Miracle Project. It involved offering Sentinel readers the chance to pony up some money to make small-ish, doable things happen for someone in need. It was like a low-end Make-A-Wish meets GoFundMe, long before there was an internet. Annie was a driving force.
Once a month, the group would meet to vet requests that came from local service groups and agencies. I would write up the “cases” and publish them. People would send in money, and problems got solved.
Annie, who was then an administrator at the Comitis Crisis Center, at the time the only crisis program in the city and much of the region, was a fountain of people with solvable problems.
Annie’s cases weren’t people she’d just heard about. She knew everyone she presented to us that needed car tires that had gone flat. The car had a mom and kids living in it, and mom couldn’t get to work with flat tires.
Annie would enthrall us with stories about a man who had his upper dentures stolen in a Denver shelter while he slept. Without new teeth, he had no chance of getting a job in a hardware store, the only work he knew.
Annie mixed her verbal musing about who snatched the man’s choppers and what sadistic things they probably did with them with a profound and emotional sympathy for the man, who was the victim of a world he had no power over.
Without teeth and the ability to get work, he was at Comitis when they had space and on the street when they didn’t.
“It’s awful,” Annie would say, just like she did about so many people stuck on a problem most of us would just complain about, solve and move past.
“Yeah. But what are you gonna do?”
Annie’s rhetorical refrain, used to punctuate another episode in the endless epic of people in trouble, wasn’t rhetoric.
“But what are you gonna do?”
She knew.
Annie did something for everyone she could. She worked phones, retrieved answers, got rides to hospitals, food stamp offices and enrolled both kids and adults in schools, training and housing programs.
Her entire professional life was a cycle of sighing, “yeah, but what are you gonna do,” and then doing what needed to be done.
Annie was an inspiration to me and so many others, who by example, could snicker about tragedy to disarm it and then provide just enough advice, bus tokens, meal vouchers and solid answers to move people to a place where they had a chance to keep moving forward.
Annie taught me that you can’t solve every problem for people, but without a whole lot of effort, you can solve one or two. And sometimes, a lot of times, that’s enough to get someone to start moving out of their quagmire.
Because of Annie, I don’t even hesitate when I can give a stranger a ride or hand over my lunch money to someone with an “anything helps” sign at a stoplight. I’ll stand in line at the DMV when I can to help get someone a state ID, because there’s no way forward without one. None.
For years now, I’ve listened to herds of community leaders in Aurora, Denver and at the state and Washington capitols pitch, vote for and against what they think will solve our endless problems.
We need more people like Annie. But what are you gonna do?
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
Annie sounds like a wonderful person, the kind of which we need more, and the kind I wish I had known.
Well Dave you got this one right, 100 percent. Thats the first time I have said that in over 40 yrs. This is not an insult to you but a testament to Annie. I first met Annie in the early 80’s while she was at Comitis. I would bring in the kids who needed her help. That was the start of a friendship that continued through her time at the detention center and through her time with Aurora Mental health. I will always consider her a friend. I will miss her.
Beautiful article. Thanks for such a lovely tribute to Annie. She was my sister-in-law and there will always be a empty space in my heart with her passing. Such a wonderful woman she was for so many people.