dragging caused open wounds that became chronic infections. He was discharged with morphine and monitored closely by Charbonneau. Fear of addiction and Tommy’s drug history made it so doctors wouldn’t prescribe him opioid pain medications. They prescribed gabapentin, which helped with his nerve pain. But Tommy was mostly on his own with little medical pain management. “Nothing,” Charbonneau said. “It’s just, ‘here’s your prescriptions’, we fill them, and all of a sudden, there’s no refill. Nothing. The pain, no one could cope with that.” After a month in the hospital, Tommy came home in a wheelchair, and Charbonneau arranged her schedule around her son’s needs. She moved him to the front living room couch and slept on the back couch to be close and to give him morphine when he needed it. She helped him up the stairs backward. She pushed him to the bathroom on a small chair. She monitored every pill. She went with him to every appointment. She did all of it because he was Tommy, and he was hers. A motor vehicle theft conviction connected to the crash eventually sent Tommy to the Colorado Department of Corrections for two years. The time in prison exacerbated his mental health issues. He walked out of prison speaking to people no one else could see, describing microphones planted in his toothpaste and signals tapped into his brain. Charbonneau suspects Tommy was assaulted in prison, but he wouldn’t talk about it. “That’s not how you treat someone who has a brain injury and stick them in the most dangerous, volatile, hostile environment,” Charbonneau said. “It broke my heart. It should have been different.” Charbonneau said she was frustrated with how little support was offered to convicts. She is grateful that her son’s probation officer always tried to help Tommy. But with few programs to help him adjust, Tommy never bounced back. “It takes baby steps to get back to the real streets of the world. That wasn’t offered,” Charbonneau said. Tommy did live at a halfway house and participated in case management. But he never received the wrap around services that were needed to truly rebuild his life. After prison, Charbonneau made sure her door was always open and that Tommy’s room was always available to him. It is still untouched, exactly as he left it. Charbonneau would never give up on her son. But Charbonneau had rules: no drugs or alcohol in the home. “He always knew that I was his safety net, that I would be there for him. He always knew that he could come home,” she said. The brain injury had done something to Tommy’s sense of self and his place in the world. Charbonneau believes he didn’t want to be a burden to her. She thinks that the streets, as hard as they were, felt like a place where he wasn’t pulling someone he loved down. She watched him leave again and again, and she learned to let him go. “It was painful every time he left. You just learn to live with it,” she said. “You just deal with the emotions and wait for the next thing to flare up.” Tommy struggled with crippling pain. Charbonneau thinks the pain and mental health issues may have been the reason he turned to drugs like meth on the street. Tommy told her he had tried drugs like heroin once, but he didn’t use them. She said the coroner’s report stated that the drugs in Tommy’s possession were laced with fentanyl and cocaine. It was a deadly combination. Tommy didn’t have fentanyl test strips or other harm reduction tools that may have alerted him to their life-taking power. Charbonneau never stopped showing up. She met him at RTD Light Rail stations with gabapentin for his nerve pain. He would call, and she would deliver ibuprofen, clean clothes, and rolled cigarettes. She took him to lunch downtown. She bought him shoes every two months because he walked everywhere. She said shoes didn’t last long because he walked 20,000 to 50,000 steps in a day, his broken foot dragging beneath him, sometimes a guitar too. The last voicemail he left her came from 16th Street Mall. Charbonneau met him the next day. Tommy was sober. He stood at her truck window and put his left hand on her shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay, Mom. Trust me,” he said. He died a day and a half later. Charbonneau asked the coroner for a photo of Tommy’s hand and said she is planning to get a tattoo of it on her shoulder. She may even embed the tattoo with some of Tommy’s ashes. Charbonneau still won’t give up on her son. She volunteers at Joy’s Kitchen, distributing food to people experiencing homelessness several days a week. She donates to Giving Hearts in Englewood. She keeps supply bags in her truck to give away year-round and goes through about 50 of them every winter. She does it because of Tommy, and because she knows now what most people don’t: that the person on the corner with a sign was not always there, did not plan to be there, and cannot simply decide to leave. “Nobody chooses to be homeless,” she said. “Tommy didn’t grow up and say, ‘I wanna grow up and be an addict.’ Nobody does.” But circumstances took control of his life, and he couldn’t get it back. Charbonneau wants there to be more support, more services, and more housing for individuals experiencing homelessness so no one else dies the way Tommy did. In her house she keeps a memorial to honor Tommy. It has his photographs, guitar picks, his hats. Sometimes one of the hats falls off the shelf despite being secured in place. She wonders if it is Tommy trying to reach out. Charbonneau lets the hat stay on the ground for a while. “Tommy wasn’t homeless; he always had a home here with me, even if he didn’t come home,” Charbonneau said. “Every single person’s worth a shot at saving, at getting a home.” Tammy Charbonneau in her son Tommy’s bedroom. She has left it untouched since the day he died. 6 FEATURE
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