The heroic life and tragic death of Trey Helten

I saw Trey Helten for the last time in September last year. It was a typical day in Vancouvers Downtown Eastside. A constant drizzle fell. People crowded into doors, slept on the wet sidewalk or stood together like broken dolls when their drugs captured.

Trey had been there himself. He spent years without homeless and addictive on these streets and then worked for more years at a supervised drug usage site and tried to help people survive the opioid crisis. Now he got out. He had exhausted his job, beaten up and hoped to make a fresh start.

He appeared for our meeting with his ubiquitous black dog Zelda. He tied her leash to a railing and we went to a diner and a conversation for lunch.

His story was a confidante. Trey got into trouble when he was a child and started smoke at the age of 14. He left the school. He moved to downtown Eastside, one of the roughest, poorest quarter of Canada. He completed heroin. In the end he slept pale and scarred on the sidewalk, a ruin of a man, his pretty face.

Then one day he entered an anonymous meeting in anesthetic and pushed a shopping cart full of his things. With the help of NA and addiction medicine, he became sober. He started to be used voluntarily at the use of drugs. He was a natural talent with commanding presence and a hand to treat customers straight away. It didn't take long for it to lead the place.

Trey became a famous figure in the city center of Eastside, which was immediately recognizable with its occupied leather vest and its highly towering, brightly colored Mohawk.

He seemed to be everywhere. With Zelda at his side down the East Hastings Street. Speak in documentaries and messages about the devastation caused by the overdose epidemic. Buying bacon and eggs for a fighting friend in a stand in the Ovaltine Café. He knew everyone and everyone knew him: police officers, social workers, first aiders, dealers, users.

Like a soldier in a long war, he saw many of his comrades over the years. But he also saved many and jumped in to revive them with a dash of naloxone or dose of oxygen.

He was on days, nights and weekends. People lead to drug detoxification. Visit fallen friends in the hospital. Offer someone a place to crash while sorting out things. Where other creepy subhumans saw Taumten Taumten, he saw people. He knew her names and stories.

And yet there was a shadow over Trey when I visited him. He had a looking look. It was there in his eyes. He could not shake the feeling that was so common among those in his world that he was somehow contemptuous, worthless. For others he had all the sympathy in the world; none for yourself.

In the first line of Charles Dickens' David CopperfieldDavid Copperfield asks: “Whether I will turn out to be a hero of my own life.” If you asked Trey this question, he would have laughed or twitched. He could never see himself like that no matter how well he had done and how much pain he had sounded.

He came out of a hard route when I saw him at lunch last autumn. He had started consuming drugs again.

He had an angry collapse at work. He got into a fight with his youthful son. One night he passed out and landed in the hospital with pneumonia.

Something had to change. After days of the painful withdrawal, he managed to leave the drugs again. When we spoke, he had just accepted a new job: calling corpses for the BC Coroners Service. A strange choice, he agreed. Not exactly a mood lift. But he thought it was useful. He would get a text from a dispatcher, bounce and go in his van. He was good with the families.

On free days he led anonymous meetings of narcotics. He hoped to remove things with his son. A few months after our lunch, his girlfriend got pregnant with his child.

I didn't talk to Trey for a while. Autumn passed, winter came and went. Then my phone shone with a text from the west coast last month. One day Trey had not reported for work. Friends went to his place. Trey died at the age of 42. Nobody said like, but everyone had the same falling thoughts.

Human quantities of people fell in his one -day memorial service in East Hastings to say their farewell party at the beginning of this month. They were the usual colorful crew, many wore the markings and wounds of street life. They left flowers in front of his picture. They cried. They laughed. You sang karaoke. They leaned to stroke Zelda. They wondered as possible that Trey, the indestructible, had disappeared.

Trey Helten may not be the hero of his own life, but he was one for her. He was one for me.