15th in a 100-Part Series

YEARS

Thomasine Gaines and her late husband, Furnie Gaines, met when they were both drinking. That was in the days before the Rescue Mission came into their lives and helped them.

Furnie became the Mission’s operations manager. Eventu-ally, Thomasine started working in the Mission’s day drop-in shelter.

“I got sick and tired of getting sick and tired,” she

says of those days when she lived in Trenton’s housing projects and struggled with addiction. Furnie wanted to marry her. I told him, ‘If you help me get out of the projects, I’ll marry you.’ Nine months later, he bought a house and we moved in.”

They stayed at the house

Rebuilding Lives - Thomasine Gaines

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for two years before building a home in Ewing Township. Things were going well. But Furnie was diagnosed with liver cancer and the couple moved to a condominium complex in Lawrence Township. After about a month, Furnie succumbed to the disease.

Through it all, the Rescue Mission has been a constant in Gaines’ life. “Furnie was a big part of the Mission, and without him I wouldn’t be where I am today” she says,

wistfully. “He worked here 15 years.”

Gaines describes her own recovery from addiction. After some 20 years of taking drugs, she has been clean for 26. “I had had a nervous breakdown,” she says. “I was selling my body. I did all those things. It’s not easy getting off drugs. And it can happen to anyone. By working in the shelter, it helps me, because I don’t want to go back and be in that situation.”

Most of all, Gaines is happy to help others who

are in the predicament she knows well. “I was once where those people are,” she says. “I know how it is. I sympathize with them and I try to help.”

Visit rmtrenton.org.