It all started a few months after my son, Korey, took his life. Air tests were conducted on our home, and it tested very high for mold. We received a letter telling us to move so they could remediate the mold. There were no displacement costs paid and nowhere for us to go. No one put us up in a hotel, and the home was owned by the Housing Authority of Luzerne County.
The next two homes were also problematic. The last one, approved by the Housing Authority, had a downspout configuration that had been outlawed more than 30 years earlier. The home should never have been approved, and we should never have been forced to leave our home disabled, grieving, and with nowhere to go.
We thought we would move across the country, as my doctor advised. I had contracted Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis from mold exposure, and in order to survive, I needed to leave the area. We were so naïve. We truly believed we would find a place to live and begin to heal.
Instead, we were unable to find stable housing anywhere. We moved from state to state, only able to stay in shelters for a few weeks at a time. This went on for more than eight years. We forgot who we were. We were treated like garbage, as though we no longer existed. Family and friends stopped answering their phones long ago. We were completely alone, and no one cared enough to even ask what had happened to us.
When we finally did get into an apartment, it was loaded with mold. I was taken by ambulance to the hospital almost immediately. A case manager at one of the shelters where we had stayed did not like us at all and actually arranged for us to be placed in that severely moldy apartment.
This was the first of many horrific people who were supposed to help us but instead chose to harm and abuse us.
And as for my art career, that disappeared too. I couldn’t get any of my so-called case managers to believe that I was Marelle Couture. I remember one woman at a shelter in Las Vegas looking at me as though I were on drugs when I tried to explain who I was and what I had done professionally.
Many of the other women in the shelters were treated badly by residents, while we were being abused by staff. It became so bad that the state Ombudsman became involved, and the grant department launched an investigation because of what happened to my daughter.
We are not okay, and we never will be completely okay after everything that happened to us.
This article was written about us when we first became homeless:
The truth is that this story is not over.
We are still living with many of the consequences of what happened to us. We are still struggling with housing issues. We are still dealing with mold exposure. I am still very ill, and every day remains a challenge.
After years of being displaced, ignored, disbelieved, and pushed aside, there are times when it feels as though the system simply expects people like us to disappear. But we are still here.
For a long time, survival took every ounce of energy I had. There was little room left for creativity, writing, or art. Yet art has always been part of who I am, and I have come to realize that I need to return to it—not only because it gives me a voice, but because it may be the path that helps me find a way forward.
In the coming months, I will be sharing a new series of paintings centered around fish and underwater imagery. The work will explore grief, loss, deception, danger, resilience, survival, and the hidden currents that shape our lives. Some of the paintings will be difficult. Some of the stories behind them will be difficult. But they will be honest.
For me, these paintings are more than artwork. They are a way of documenting what happened, processing the trauma, and reclaiming a part of myself that was nearly lost along the way.
I do not know what the future holds. I do know that I am not finished creating. I am not finished telling this story. And I have not given up hope that through my artwork I may find a way out of the circumstances that have defined so much of the last decade of my life.
This is where I begin again.
La Marelle Couture 
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