Roger-Luc Chayer (Photo : Pixabay)
Iram, 34, wants to end it all, but no longer knows where to begin. This true story is deeply sad, but I felt I had to share it with you.
Here begins a heartbreakingly real story: the story of Iram, a young Afghan refugee who arrived in Canada as a child. He fell into drugs very early and has haunted Montreal’s Gay Village for fifteen years now, unable to figure out how to end his misery — or even where to start.
I’ve known him for a very long time. Back then, he was a stunning young model in his early twenties, with tanned skin and striking blue eyes. He turned heads wherever he swayed innocently through the city. An openly gay man, he fell in with the wrong crowd who quickly introduced him to drugs — and not just any drugs. Anything laced with fentanyl was given to him in exchange for sexual favours. As we know, fentanyl addiction comes fast, and barely two years after discovering the Gay Village, he had become a permanent resident of its streets. He lost everything: his social circle, his apartment, his belongings, and his dignity.
He became part of the urban furniture, against his will but powerless to fight his addiction. He sold his charms to anyone who would lie and tell him he was still beautiful — even though he had lost his muscles, his glow, and all his teeth but one. That last tooth stood like a lone Gaul facing a Roman legion refusing to surrender, giving him the pitiful look of a man stripped of all pride.
It was he who once confided to me that he could never access detox services: he either didn’t have the money, or he didn’t have a fixed address to qualify for the free programs Montreal offers its residents. He had lost his rightful title of “Montrealer” and had become just another “man of the asphalt,” the guy on the pavement — and that doesn’t count for the city.
He also confessed to me once that he had thought about killing someone, just like that, for nothing — because it would have earned him fifteen years in federal prison and there, at least, he would have received free detox services. But he never found the strength to destroy an innocent life. Because deep inside that raw, festering wound, there is still a heart.
And it was that heart, which I ran into by chance a few weeks ago, that told me he was foolish to think he could ever get out of this. That at 34, his life couldn’t be rebuilt. That his body bore too many scars to ever heal. He had mourned his life — that awful life of a homeless addict in Montreal’s Gay Village. So he made the decision to look for the exit door, the one that would finally let him go.
Oh no, not suicide — not the way you’d think. No. He just wanted to lie down and give himself permission to die with dignity, something he had asked for but had been denied on the grounds that his suffering wasn’t severe enough. So he decided he would choose the moment himself to claim “his” medical assistance in dying — the final act of respect he felt he owed his battered body.
This story is unspeakably sad because it shows what happens to people left to fend for themselves, blamed for all the troubles in the Village when, for so many, all they really want is a way out.
Because Pride is also this — even if it’s buried under years of dust. Iram, too, has his gay pride.
By the way, I, who used to see him at least twice a week wandering the Village, haven’t seen him once since our conversation. I doubt he found the help he needed to even begin a detox. I just fear that he finally chose to give himself that medical assistance in dying, with dignity — with PRIDE — because that was the final gesture he wanted to make, out of love for the body the world had broken and abandoned.
Thank you, Iram.
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