Rachel Church is 8 years clean and sober, and back in the workforce

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You could be forgiven for mistaking Rachel Church for any other fortysomething mom on an ebike zipping through the Mission to pick up her daughter at elementary school.

Church, however, has a tendency to blast Charles Bukowski audiobooks while pedaling through San Francisco. 

“I like to hear someone else who worked through the craziness that I lived,” explains Church, now 41. This is something she does before scooping up her kid and heading off to ballet. 

Mission Local readers first met Church in 2019. It was a redemptive tale of a woman who had spiraled into the darkest corners hidden in plain sight in San Francisco.

An underaged sex worker walking the streets at 14. An alcoholic paying for three-dollar bottles of vodka with small change. A heroin addict. A barefoot homeless woman washing her hair in the gutter. A “High User of Multiple Services” with a rap sheet six pages long.

“There was a time several years ago,” Officer Robert Rueca of the San Francisco Police Department told us in 2019, “that there wouldn’t be a day we didn’t contact Rachel at some level of hardship.

“When she was intoxicated, if she was not able to take care of herself, we’d take her in and release her when she was sober. That happened countless times. And, a number of times, she was arrested. I, myself, arrested her in October of 2013.”

It took a small army of social workers, a few hitches in jail and more than a few shots at rehab, but Church got busy living. She attended college and earned a degree. She is living on her own with her grade school-aged daughter. Church is eight years sober, has positive people in her life and, notably, she’s back in the workforce. 

So, things worked out. Rachel Church could’ve died. Instead, she lived. But Church has seen far too much, lived far too much, to expect any sort of happily ever after. 

When Church was 19, she had a chance encounter that would change her life. But not right away. And not all at once. 

A 68-year-old Italian-born retired ironworker named Mario Di Tano saw her lugging her worldly possessions along Lombard Street. His own child had died young and, altruistically, he stepped into Church’s life. For the next two decades, he would care for her as if she were his own daughter. 

It wasn’t easy. Di Tano sweet-talked and pushed and cajoled Church into sobriety, and supported her in resuming her education. And she did: By 2009, she’d kicked heroin and earned her A.A. from City College.

But in 2011, Church relapsed into alcoholism. She spent the next several years living on the streets of the Mission District. 

“I think I lost her. I cannot help anymore,” Di Tano told us six years ago, recalling the darkest days. “She start drinking. This is not the way I want it.”

When your humble narrator last saw Di Tano in 2019, he was 82 and sitting contentedly with Church and her young daughter in a City College cafeteria. The craziest times were, by and large, in the rearview mirror. 

After a last stint in jail a decade ago, Church had come out sober and determined to stay that way. So, naturally, she married a dope dealer living in a mobile home, became pregnant and then became a widow in short order when her husband suffered a fatal mishap tied to swallowing a baggie of crack cocaine when the heat was closing in.

Church got through that. But there was more to come: In 2020, Church was driving on Potrero Avenue when she received a terse phone call from a nurse. There was no lead-in, no chance to prepare: Just “I have bad news. You have cancer.” Church managed not to drive off the side of the road.

She was 37 then. She went through four rounds of chemo and a double mastectomy. But she’s better now. Rachel Church is better. But not happily ever after. 

A couple years after Church’s cancer diagnosis, Di Tano got one of his own. But by the time doctors detected Di Tano’s liver cancer, it was at stage four.

Church would have to lug him up and down the stairs of his Marina District apartment for blood transfusions. He was pale as a ghost and sweating bullets and there was so, so much bleeding. 

Di Tano’s liver cancer led to a condition called hepatic encephalopathy, in which toxins are not filtered out of the body and instead accumulate in the brain. If that sounds bad, it’s because it is: This can lead to a variety of symptoms, including personality changes.

As the end drew near, the normally kindly Di Tano was delusional, angry and vindictive. It was hard for everyone.

On Di Tano’s last day — March 4, 2022 — Church curled up next to him in his bed in the ICU at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center on Parnassus Avenue and cried and cried and cried. Her daughter put a Snoopy sticker on Di Tano’s chest. Church had time to tell him she loved him one last time.

Mario Di Tano was 86. Church bought him an extravagant headstone. In bright pink. 

Church does not dwell in the Mission anymore, physically or metaphysically. Rather, she rapidly motors past the landmarks of her past on her trusty ebike, resembling any other San Francisco parent squiring around a busy child.

There’s school, gymnastics, dance, choir; it’s a lot. Church speeds though the streets where she used to meet johns as a teenager, or get high, or pass out on the pavement. But she keeps her eyes ahead of her; she has places to go, now. 

When God closes a door, he opens a window. Caring for Di Tano could’ve led to a breakdown or a relapse. Instead, it provided Church with a purpose; she decided to make tending to those in need her life’s work.

Church applied for and received $3,000 from the state Department of Rehabilitation and used it to attain a Certified Medical Assistant degree from San Francisco State University. Just this month, she landed an externship at a surgery center. 

Church has, improbably, overcome a lot in her life. But the logistics of San Francisco parenthood, let alone single parenthood, are daunting. It worries her. The pressures of a real job scare her, too. Now that she’s achieved something and made something of herself, what if she loses it all? 

Di Tano isn’t here to watch his surrogate daughter or granddaughter anymore. But, in a manner, he’s still helping out. When the pressure builds and Church’s confidence begins to waver, she can still hear his voice: 

Rachel! What-a-da-fuck are you thinking? Get-a-home. Take a shower. Eat. Take-a care of your kid!

And she always does.