The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
David and Gage Walker
They found my son collapsed in the median on West Ina near Oracle on June 12. No ID. No wallet. Just a phone. That’s how the hospital reached me — because even in the middle of that, some part of him still pointed to me.
He was 31.
I’ve written about him before. About the group homes. About the placements. About how hard it is to keep someone alive when the system built to help them is always disappearing beneath your feet. I said once that the word “placed” felt like a miracle. Now the word is “cremated.”
Gage didn’t die because he was schizophrenic. He died because the only thing that ever quieted his symptoms was methamphetamine. And the last time he tried to quiet them, it killed him.
No one should judge that. Not if they’ve never seen what it’s like to live in a mind that will not let you rest. There were times Gage believed terrible things were happening to his family. That we were being tortured, hurt, silenced. These visions overtook him. He would become frozen, unreachable, sometimes catatonic. Afterward, he’d often say he felt responsible for not being able to protect us. The guilt stayed with him longer than the delusion did.
He wasn’t weak. He was hunted. Every waking hour of his life. And he still made it 31 years.
I have his suitcase here. The one he brought with him to his last transitional placement. Zipped and untouched. He left it behind. I don’t think he meant to take it. I think he knew he was going back to being homeless. I haven’t opened it. Not because I don’t care what’s inside. Because I do, it’s the last thing he touched before disappearing for the last time.
Schizophrenia isn’t rare. Not when you count the families it fractures. Not when you count the parents who become legal guardians just to get a say in their child’s care. Not when you count the ones who die like this — quietly, in medians and alleyways and holding cells.
The NIH spends more on sleep research than it does on schizophrenia. Cancer funding outpaces it tenfold. Cardiovascular disease, even more. And yet people with schizophrenia die 20 to 30 years earlier than average. The Standardized Mortality Ratio for schizophrenia is between 2.5 and 3.7 — meaning it kills at rates higher than most cancers, and far higher than heart disease. But the research dollars don’t follow because the people it kills are mostly poor. Mostly disenfranchised. Mostly invisible. They don’t vote in blocs. They don’t fund campaigns. And so they are left to die — quietly, predictably, off-budget.
And what little infrastructure exists is being stripped. Medicaid. Housing support. Case management. All on the chopping block—repackaged as reforms. You won’t hear the word “abolish.” You’ll hear “fiscal streamlining.”
I had lunch with him the day before he died. I was suspicious he was not taking his meds, and the place he was staying did not monitor this. But he was clearer than usual. No pharmacological fog. Just the unfiltered shape of him. He talked like someone already leaving. Not in a dramatic way — just already gone.
I’ve been told Gage’s death was an overdose. I know. But that’s not what killed him. What killed him was every single failed discharge, every budget line crossed out, every politician who said the market would take care of it.
What killed him was a culture that treats suffering as spectacle. That thinks meth is a choice. That thinks love is enough.
It isn’t.
I’m not blaming. I’m reporting.
My son is dead.
He didn’t overdose because he wanted to get high. He overdosed because meth was the only thing that made the voices stop. It did what nothing else could.
People talk about closure. There isn’t any.
There’s just the space he left. And the days that keep happening anyway.
In a world that watched him and tens of thousands like him suffer and called it inevitable.
Follow these steps to easily submit a letter to the editor or guest opinion to the Arizona Daily Star.
