The search party walked slowly up Alvarado Street by MacArthur Park and turned right onto Wilshire Boulevard, filled with heartbreak and hope.
Barbara Siegman and Michele Wood, mother and daughter, were searching for a 34-year-old named Jackie, who is homeless and addicted to drugs. Jackie is Siegman’s granddaughter and Wood’s daughter. This was not their first search; it probably would not be their last.
They’ve found Jackie more than once over the past few years, on the Westside and in MacArthur Park. But it’s as if fentanyl has taken her prisoner, and they can’t convince her to make a run for it. They’ve pleaded with her to come home. They’ve tried an intervention. They’ve driven Jackie to a treatment center that she quickly abandoned. Nothing has worked.
But they keep trying.
Maybe it’s partly because Siegman — a 78-year-old retiree who has been sober for more than 45 years, and Wood, 58 — recall their own years of youthful abandon. They acknowledge having indulged in the popular drug of the moment, and Wood said when her mother tried to ground her while she was growing up in Van Nuys, “I just jumped out of the window” and hit the streets. If both of them were able to turn it around, why not Jackie?
And maybe it’s partly because Jackie seemed to be on the right path in her 20s; she was smart and successful, working for several years as a manager at high-end restaurants. But in her late teens, she began getting hammered by excruciating migraines, and later had severe vertigo. She was diagnosed with a cyst on her brain and was prescribed anxiety medication. For the headaches, she told her mother, methamphetamine brought relief.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age — and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
Wood, who works in real estate and lives in Manhattan Beach, has teamed with her fiance and friends — as well as her mother — in pursuit of Jackie. She’s kept up this quest even during treatment for cancer, often going out alone, sometimes in the rain, showing photos of Jackie to strangers and hoping someone might have a lead.
I asked her if she’s ever been afraid.
“Oh, hell yes,” Wood said.
She once entered an abandoned— and trashed — Westside office building filled with addicts. It was “like a horror movie,” she said. But at least she knew her surroundings as she searched for Jackie in Venice, Culver City and Mid-City. MacArthur Park — where Jackie moved a few months ago — was never on her radar.
“It’s one thing to do scary things in my own neighborhood,” Wood said of Westside environs she has scoured. “It’s another thing to do them in a neighborhood I don’t even know.”
::
As they walked and searched, Siegman, who has had two hip replacements, fell behind Wood. I was at her side when we came upon an alley where drug users gather day and night, and a dozen or more people were there as we approached.
“It looks like people are shooting up right in front of everybody,” Siegman said as we walked by.
Given her past, Siegman understands addiction and believes that arresting everyone wouldn’t end the epidemic. “I don’t know what the answer is,” she said. “It’s not any one thing.”
But in her mind, the lines between acceptable and unacceptable behavior seem to have been erased. And she said she’d prefer for Jackie to be in jail than in the middle of this harrowing scene of social collapse, where tents are landscape features, people are curled up on sidewalks, and violence and overdose emergencies keep the sirens screaming.
“I just think there should be some consequences to being a habitual person on the streets taking illicit drugs,” Siegman said. “It shouldn’t be OK.”
Wood doesn’t have all the answers either, but said she operates on the principle that “no one is disposable,” no matter how lost and helpless they might seem. Her constant worry — “I can barely keep my head above water” — is troubling to her mother.
“I know that she hurts a lot about this,” Siegman said. But she tells Wood, who has two other daughters, that she has to live her life. Jackie’s not a kid, Siegman says, and you can’t tell an adult what to do, nor can you save an addict who isn’t ready to be rescued. It’s got to come from inside.
I can identify with all of that in a deeply personal way. Three years ago, I lost my 43-year-old son, Jeffrey, to a drug overdose that followed years of depression and addiction. He had a good job and an apartment near the beach, which helped him mask the magnitude of his struggles, and he insisted he didn’t need any help.
If you pushed back on that, he recoiled or retreated, and you were left to fear the worst while hoping for the best. With parenting, you’re always holding on and letting go, struggling to find the right balance.
Siegman asked if, in retrospect, I wished I’d handled anything differently.
It’s a question that has kept me awake many a night, but I don’t know the answer. And I can’t assume I had any power to know, or have any control over, the world my son lived in.
I did what a lot of parents do — you love them, launch them and pray that they’re happy and healthy. Near the end, when he hit a low point, I once got so frustrated by my son’s resistance to help, I wanted to grab him, shake him, and tell him to quit deceiving himself and the people who loved him. But I didn’t. Whether it would have made a difference, I’ll never know.
::
Three weeks before our search, Siegman and Wood had found Jackie living in a tent under a tree on Wilshire Boulevard near Good Samaritan Hospital. So, they were headed back to that spot now, even though she has a nomadic history.
Wood pulled up a photo of Jackie on her phone to show anyone she could find in and around the tents on Wilshire.
Then she began peeking into tents, identifying herself as Jackie’s mother.
“Hey there, anyone home?”
She noticed a dog bowl outside one tent and wondered if Jackie, who had recently acquired a shepherd mix, might be inside. But the occupant was a woman named Samantha. Farther east along Wilshire, a young man named Jack crawled out of a small tent.
“My name is Michele,” Wood said. “Have you seen Jackie? This is a picture of her, and this is her boyfriend, Victor.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’ve seen her right up there. On the corner up there.”
Wood gave her thanks, adding: “If you see her, will you let her know I came by? I’m her mom.”
Siegman, meanwhile, had advanced to the next intersection and was waving back at us.
“I found Victor,” she called out.
When we caught up to her, Siegman said Victor had told her Jackie was nearby, and he’d run off to retrieve her.
Wood took a deep breath. Going back a few years, to when Jackie was living indoors but beginning her descent, Wood had tried repeatedly to convince her to get help, only to end up disappointed. They were usually happy to see each other at these encounters, Wood said, but the conversations often ran in circles, with Jackie pulling yet another excuse from the arsenal of reasons she couldn’t turn things around just yet.
After a few minutes, Jackie appeared across Wilshire with her dog, Luna, making her way toward her mother and grandmother. She wore a camouflage jacket, tights with a skull print, white sneakers and sunglasses.
She looked reasonably healthy for someone who’d spent years on the street, but there was a mix of weariness and sadness in her eyes. When all three generations came together, they hugged, and there were smiles and tears.
Jackie was open to sharing some of her story with me. She said she’d had it together when she was younger, and she loved her restaurant jobs, but felt as though she underwent a personality change after her health deteriorated.
“The migraines kind of made me a bit different,” she said. “Like, a lot more depressed. It was really scary. ... I lost my balance. My inner ear got all [f—] up.”
Her eyes glistened.
“I was so normal for so long,” she said. “Everybody was so proud.”
Wood moved in and wrapped her daughter in a hug.
“Jackie, I’m still proud of you,” she said. “You’re just in a really hard place.”
Siegman noticed that Jackie had a cellphone — sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t — and asked for the number, so it would be easier to stay in touch.
“We didn’t know where you were for a very long time,” Siegman said.
“It wasn’t unintentional,” Jackie said. “I just got kind of lost.”
Jackie insisted she’s capable of making good choices and believes she will. Eventually. She and Victor were told by someone from Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program that they would soon be moved into housing, and they told me they wanted to get off fentanyl. Victor said he’d gotten a long-acting injection that dampens drug craving and can lead to recovery. It worked for a while, he said, but he needed another, if he could find a doctor, and Jackie said she wanted to join him.
As it is, Jackie said, fentanyl gives her a brief euphoric surge, “and then you get this yucky feeling, and you hit it again and you feel better. ... If you’re getting good fentanyl ... you need like one hit every eight hours.”
I told Jackie about my son. Maybe it wasn’t my place to do so, but I felt compelled — in his memory on the three-year anniversary of his death — to remind her of the risk she’s taking.
She listened, a look of condolence in her eyes, but not fear. She said she has never overdosed. And she said she felt as though the life she’s living now “was destined for me. It was like everybody wished it upon me.”
That wasn’t what her grandmother or mother wanted to hear. To them, those were the words of denial — of someone still not ready to begin the hard work of recovery.
But Wood couldn’t help but try, yet again.
“You know,” she said, “you can come with me.”
Jackie said that didn’t sound like a good idea at the moment.
Wood offered to drive her and Victor to the treatment center they’d been to once before. But Jackie said she’d rather take advantage of the housing opportunity that was coming her way, and work on getting the shot that might help them kick their habit.
“I love you,” Siegman said, hugging her granddaughter. “No matter what happens.”
It seemed to me, by the look in her eyes, that a part of Jackie wanted them to stay longer, or that she wanted to find a way back to them, and to the life she once knew.
But not yet.
Grandmother and mother said goodbye and left as they had arrived, filled with heartbreak and hope.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
