On Thursday morning, Chris Schwede died alone in his tent outside Our Place of a suspected drug overdose.
His death was something he and his sisters always knew could happen. But even so, it has left Candice Csaky and Tammy Trausch raw with grief and bitter at society’s inability to help the drug-addicted.
“It was like we all knew he had a terminal illness and the time was coming. But we didn’t know when it was coming and we didn’t know how to change that course for him,” Trausch said Friday. “But it still doesn’t make you ready when the time comes. It’s still a surprise and unbelievable.”
She held Schwede’s baseball glove and sunglasses and the blue jacket he was wearing the last time she saw him. She had salvaged the familiar items from the blue tent, now a makeshift memorial, in front of the welfare office on Pandora Avenue.
Members of the street community stopped by the tent to let the sisters know how many lives their brother had saved administering naloxone to reverse drug overdoses.
“He’d tell me: ‘Candi, I’m saving lives. I’m saving lives. These people need help and if I’m not here, I can’t help them,’ ” Csaky recalled. “He saved a life the day before he died. But I wanted him to save himself first. The only life he couldn’t save was his own.”
