Diana in front of her board-and-care, Great Expectations in Oakland

Dec. 21, 2024

I had a daughter, not my biological daughter but my former ward, who died at the age of 28. Her name was Diana Vladimorovna Staros. She overdosed on meth and fentanyl September 27, 2023, in a laundromat bathroom in East Oakland.

For most of last ten years of her life she was either homeless or in a hospital. In the last months of her life she was actually not homeless; she lived in a bare-bones board-and-care, she had a case manager, and in fact she was on a permanent conservatorship for mental illness. She was trying to keep her meth use under control, by taking it only certain hours so she could get back home by curfew.

She was smart, loving, considerate, talented, and creative.

A big part of my life for the last ten years has been bothering people at agencies and contractors of the County of Alameda, trying to get them to try harder to keep her alive, because they did not try hard enough. They stopped trying to find a way to keep her away from meth and sexual exploitation.

I told them often that she was in danger. The danger she was in came from her disease, from schizophrenia and the delusions that come with it. Medications often work for schizophrenia, and she often took her medications, but they did not get rid of her delusions, especially when she was taking meth as well as meds. She thought she worked for the Army, the FBI, NASA, Loreal, and Massage Envy, and she tought she was a princess with a mansion in the city, with hundreds of children, and dozens of husbands.

Despite her delusions, she was in our world with us, we could talk and have fun together. But she also had a dangerous delusion that she needed meth to stay alive. She would say meth was a good treatment for mental illness, that it was recommended by doctors, and that she would die without it.

She died alone. A man we don’t know met her there in the laundromat, talking about drugs, and he left before she died. The police did not investigate. Paramedics restarted her heart but she never regained consciousness. After that, even though she was warm and breathing and looked like herself and even moved her shoulders and head once in a while, she was brain dead. They took care of her at Highland Hospital for 12 days, turning her, bathing her, brushing her teeth, adjusting her respirator and her medications, and they found recipients for her heart and many other parts of her body.

I beliieve she would have been okay with the donations, because when she was a teenager she filled out an organ donation card. But of course I wanted her to be alive, and she wanted to be alive. She had plans to do fun things later that month. She did not commit suicide. When she took drugs, she thought she was taking medicine that she needed, meth, not fentanyl that would kill her.

It is hard for me to deal with her death because I had been fearing this death and rehearsing it for so many years. I got many calls over the years from her or someone else saying she was in a hospital or in jail or in some public place wanting a ride. I would look for her in People’s Park, at the bottom of Gilman Street, in that big field near Marina Village in Alameda, in Oakland at Union Landing, at Wood Street, at the Jack London Marina, under 880, at the Jack in the Box near 14th Avenue, under 580 at Crow Canyon road, at the Hayward Plunge, in the hills by Cal State East Bay, and in the Tenderloin.

I still keep my phone on, by my bed all night. She called me the morning she died but, for once, the phone was tangled up in the blankets and I didn’t hear it or answer it. That day she took a walk and took meth, and died.

And I’ve been surprised, ever since, that her death, in itself, didn’t make more people get it, didn’t make them understand that the system is very broken.

It is broken and it let her die. She would have had a longer, better life in a locked facility like Villa Fairmont, or in a very very supportive unlocked one like Psynergy, but those beds are scarce, and the county Acute Care Committee did not want to waste such beds on her any more. And so she died.