Local opinion: Hope for a son, as the dismantling of mercy continues

and analysis of the writer:

Today, my son Gage moved into an adult transitional living program near where he was raised in Midtown. A neighborhood that now looks both too familiar and too strange, like a movie set still standing long after the actors left. We’ve been in this moment. This hopeful fork in the road, already littered with the tire marks of previous failures. I’m trying not to think about that.

He came from The Ranch, a place that lived up to something like healing. Horses with long eyelashes blinked like they understood. Pigs that napped in the sun like retired gods. That kind of therapy doesn’t come in bottles but in the smell of hay and the weight of a horse leaning into you just because you’re there.

He’ll miss it. I’ll miss it. But he’s back in the city now. Closer to buses and the past he’s trying to live forward from.

Gage is schizophrenic. Not a mood, not a bad phase, an incurable neurological storm that scrambles perception into terror. Neuro-electrochemical chaos snapping across synapses, rearranging meaning, inventing voices, twisting memory into accusation. Without medication, he sees things no one should see. Without support, his world becomes a nightmare with no waking.

He’s been homeless in 40 states. He’s slept under bridges, in bus stations, on church steps. He’s been hospitalized for dehydration, rhabdomyolysis, hypothermia. He nearly froze to death in a northern winter, alone. Not because he made bad choices. Because he was born with a condition the world refuses to accommodate. A condition that doesn’t pause when funding dries up.

And now, after all of that, he’s placed. Not cured. Not fixed. But stable enough to try. A room. A key. A group of professionals who don’t disappear when the grant cycle ends. And that fragile win is proof that this kind of support works.

His story shouldn’t be rare. But in this country, it is, and the system that made it possible isn’t eroding. It’s being shattered. Purposefully.

The newest proposal from the Trump administration, marketed like a timeshare as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” would make futures like Gage’s nearly impossible. Medicaid, gutted. Food assistance, slashed. Housing support, stripped down to slogans about independence. As if schizophrenia were a discipline problem. As if you could bootstrap your way out of a psychotic break.

This bill hands billions in tax cuts to people with vacation homes and personalized accountants — and it pays for them by making sure thousands of others never get what Gage just barely did: a bed that’s his, a case manager who calls back, a place to begin again.

Let me be clear: people won’t get placed. They’ll get buried. Quietly. In dehydration, frostbite, infection, despair. They will die in ER waiting rooms and alleyways. That’s what happens when you strip funding from people whose lives depend on it, not metaphorically, but physiologically.

Of course, some will say families should step in. I do. I have. But I’m not rich. And I won’t live forever. When I’m gone, there won’t be a fallback. Love doesn’t replace infrastructure. It just stands there helpless when it disappears.

Yes, I’m afraid. Gage is safe today. But I know how thin that safety is. I’ve seen what happens when that scaffold disappears. I’ve seen what it costs to get someone placed, and how fast that progress can unravel. I’ve seen what happens when you lose track of your own child.

And yet, he is placed. That word sounds small until you’ve gone years without it. Until you’ve handed police a photo and asked them to check the morgue. Until the only way to find your son is to guess which city he might be lost in.

He is neither cured nor saved. But he is placed. And in this country, that’s a miracle you hold with both hands.

This isn’t about optimism. It’s about not grieving someone twice; once when you lose them, and once when your country lets them go.