Liz's Story.

• Author: Murray, Elizabeth

BY AGE 16, HER MOM HAD DIED, HER FATHER WAS A DRUG ADDICT, AND SHE WAS HOMELESS. BUT LIZ MURRAY FOUGHT THE ODDS--AND WON.

My mother was buried on the day after Christmas, 1996. I was 16 and I had been homeless for a few months. There was no money for a proper funeral. There was no priest--just the cemetery workers sitting a few feet away, talking about sports and women, and waiting to put dirt on top of her.

My sister and a friend and I had managed to pull enough money together to take a taxi to the cemetery in upstate New York, an hour away. I remember it was freezing cold. I was wearing an army jacket and old boots with holes in them.

We stood there for about 10 or 15 minutes looking at her coffin, a donated pine box. I saw that her name had been misspelled in Magic Marker on the top. So my friend took out his Magic Marker and wrote her name, Jean, and spelled it right, and wrote, "Beloved Mother, 1954-1996," and drew an angel on it.

This was the lowest point in my life. But I didn't cry. I was thinking too much. At that moment, something in me changed.

My mom's death was a severe reality check. It forced me to re-evaluate what would happen to me if I kept going on the way I was living. I saw that I had a precious window of time in which I could get my life back together, go back to school, and make a success of myself.

And you know what? I did it. But it wasn't easy.

COCAINE, BUT NO FOOD

I grew up with my sister, mother, and father in a poor neighborhood overrun with drugs and crime, in the Bronx, New York City. My parents were cocaine addicts. My mother was also an alcoholic. We never had any food in the house. Everything was filthy and the drugs were everywhere. I used to go into the kitchen and see my parents shooting up cocaine; they didn't try to hide it. I would sit on the window sill, and stare out into the alley.

We had two cats and a dog that no one really walked or fed; you can imagine what the house was like. I had to step over piles of feces crawling with maggots to get to my room.

The welfare checks were spent before they arrived. By the end of the previous month, my mother would have run up a bar tab, and borrowed from everyone she knew. When the check came, the mood in the house was very light, very happy. My mother would listen to her old records, and my father would smile and laugh at her jokes. Then they would run out and get drugs.

I spent a lot of my nights at a 24-hour supermarket, packing groceries for tips, and I...