Shannon Jones, a former journalist, is a real estate agent in Long Beach, Calif.
It’s been three months since my son Andrey died. The grief still hits me in waves so strong I can’t breathe. But I have been grieving his loss since long before he died.
In April of 2022, I wrote in The Post about searching with my husband for Andrey on the streets of Los Angeles County. I wondered: When people saw him sleeping on the sidewalk, unkempt and disoriented, did they understand that he had a story? There was a brief period of hope when we finally found him. But then we lost him again.
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Here is the tragic coda: On a chilly Monday morning in October, a passerby found Andrey’s body on a bench less than a mile from our home, a pipe in his hand. We don’t know yet whether it was meth, his drug of choice, or whether the drugs had been laced with fentanyl.
Andrey was 31. He battled mental illness since being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, PTSD and suspected fetal alcohol syndrome at 8, shortly after we adopted him. For more than a decade, he also battled addiction. The past few years were a hopscotch trail from group home to treatment facility to rehab to cheap motel to the streets to jail, then back through the cycle again.
When we adopted Andrey, we never dreamed he’d end up homeless. He had therapy and Scouts and sports and tutors and family vacations. And love. So very much love.
Shortly after my op-ed appeared in the spring of 2022, we found Andrey again and tried to stabilize his living situation and get him treatment. Finally in late 2022, he was placed in a program through the county probation department. He was in a group home with therapy and medication management and meals.
We visited Andrey regularly, and we had hope. But there was no drug testing and little oversight, and Andrey began using again. And after going AWOL multiple times, he was moved to another group home. There, he smoked meth openly. He took a swing at a security guard. The police were called. I wish they had put him safely behind bars. Instead, he spent a week in L.A.’s Union Station.
Finally, he called me on a borrowed phone.
“Mom, I need help,” he said. “Can you come get me?” And of course, I did.
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Then came a too-brief hospitalization and another placement in a home with no support at all. We tried to have him arrested to keep him safe, but we were told the dollar amount of the bench warrant was too low, the jails too full. We spent hours making calls, desperately searching for treatment programs and housing. We were told repeatedly that he had to “choose to get help.” He was too ill to make that choice.
Share this articleShareIn the months before he died, Andrey was extremely delusional. He told us his “real parents” would be coming to get him in a spaceship. His affect was either angry or emotionless. He bore no resemblance to the fearless, funny and energetic boy we’d known. Yes, he was troubled and often troubling, but he also had a sweet, loving soul and wicked sense of humor.
When Andrey was young, we took him on the kind of vacations I never had growing up, to Hawaii and the Caribbean and on a Disney cruise. For years, he talked about how much he loved those trips.
One summer, when Andrey was 10 or 11, we went snorkeling in Maui’s Honolua Bay. The brightly colored fish, beautiful coral and sea turtles drew us farther and farther into the bay. I kept asking, “Are you still okay?” Andrey kept giving me a thumbs-up.
Way out, a pod of dolphins swam around us, so close you could touch them. We stayed there for what felt like forever. Finally, as we were swimming back, Andrey tired. So I held out my arm and let him hang on, and my buoyancy was enough to bring him safely back to shore. I wish buoyancy and love had been enough.
Five days before Andrey died, I told him, “If you can get clean, we could plan another trip, as a family. Would you like that?”
“Sure, Mom,” he said softly. But he wouldn’t let me drive him to a hospital or rehab, and I pressed. “I’m worried that you will end up dying before your dad and I.”
For the first time that night, Andrey looked at me. “Mom,” he said, “I’m already dead.”
We’d lost the son we’d known years before, but that was the night I began to grieve. My husband and I held each other as I sobbed. “There is no place in this world for Andrey,” I said. The night before we got the call, I dreamed that Andrey had died.
I hope where Andrey is now, he is at peace. But here on Earth, there are many others in his situation, needing help that isn’t there. There are an estimated 600,000 homeless people in America, 75,000 of them in Los Angeles County. The number who die each year is increasing, with drug overdoses the leading cause. And every one of them has a story. This was Andrey’s.
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