Anne Morrison was certain that she wanted to die — or at least, almost certain. “Ninety-five percent,” she told the two dozen people gathered in her living room in March, during what she planned to be her final hours.

For four years, she had suffered from breast cancer, and in recent months her condition had become terminal. She struggled to walk and soon would need to enter a permanent care facility. A combination of painkillers, anti-anxiety meds, and psychedelic mushrooms eased daily life.

If Anne had any trepidation, she calmed it with a talisman. She delicately held a copper wire with an engraved tree-of-life amulet above her palm. It was a gift from a friend of more than five decades, Season Korchin, who referred to the 85-year-old as her “sacred mother.” 

“Should I go through with this?” Anne asked the pendant. But she didn’t leave its decision to chance — she gently guided the chain to swing in her preferred direction. Yes, it said.

The small crowd in the living room breathed an uncomfortable sigh of relief.

Champagne flowed amidst blooming spring orchids in the pink living room in remembrance of Anne’s late son Garrett Ball, an avid gardener. She’d chosen to end her life on his birthday. 

Some shared stories of how Anne had saved them from addiction, homelessness, or some other deep despair and danger. A neighbor said Anne had inspired him and others to donate clothes and food to homeless people. Korchin told of how when she was 4 and broke her arm on a trip to the Amazon rainforest, Anne carried her miles to find a doctor.

Anne’s life in San Francisco did not begin with the certainty that she had on her final day. She arrived in the 1970s in personal turmoil, and her life mirrored the trajectory of the city — from a free-swinging era of experimentation and liberation through years of crisis and death. When San Francisco got dark, Anne was a bright and guiding light. To the people gathered in her apartment at her end, she was a stalwart of empathic community values and a lifesaver. She’d given them a blanket, a hug, or a listening ear when they needed it. She wasn’t necessarily a hero but was always a mother.

But there was someone who wasn’t in the room with Anne in her final hours, someone whom she wasn’t able to save: her own daughter, Jennifer Ball. 

Anne wasn’t sure where her daughter was, or if she was even still alive. Jennifer was addicted to meth. For more than two decades, Anne watched helplessly as she spiraled into drug-fueled desperation, fell into homelessness, spurned relationships with family and friends, and eventually disappeared. 

Anne’s life in San Francisco, and her choice to end it in March, are extraordinary, but her relationship with her missing daughter isn’t. For every one of the estimated 37,500 people (opens in new tab) in the city struggling with severe drug addiction, a family suffers by extension. Relatives waffle between compassion and abandonment. They fund failed trips to rehab, squeeze into Nar-Anon meetings, or back away in order to protect themselves.

That suffering shaped years of Anne’s life. She wavered between blaming Jennifer and blaming herself — a private version of the same conflict San Francisco has long had with its drug users. She always stayed close to the Tenderloin, hoping to run into her lost daughter, suspended in unresolved grief.

Then her body began to give out. She couldn’t stay any longer. 

As the weeks closed in on her chosen death date, what she called her “cosmic birthday,” Anne stopped talking about Jennifer, even as she remained haunted by a persistent hope that some day her daughter might return.

“I stayed in this apartment just because I thought she might come back. So if she tried to find me, I would be here,” Anne said, sitting quietly in the living room. “But what if she comes to knock on the door the day after I take the medicine?”  

San Francisco was awash in drugs in the early 1970s. LSD had ushered in a psychedelic revolution among young people in the Haight-Ashbury, while heroin was already entrenched on the streets, part of a growing national epidemic. 

The local underground subcultures were bringing a radical tolerance for drugs into the mainstream. The city was defined by a bold new culture of acceptance, becoming a global center for gay liberation and an incubator for the era’s most influential artists and spiritual movements. 

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Anne was living on the other side of the country, in Virginia, a housewife and mother to three: Jennifer, Martha, and Garrett. Her husband didn’t allow her to work, she said, and at night he would abuse her. In the mid-1970s, when Jennifer was 5, Anne left her family behind and escaped to San Francisco, the city that promised freedom. Soon after, she began experimenting with psychedelics, stimulants, and painkillers.

During a night out in Marin, Anne met a charming man named Sia, who gave her opium on their first date. She quicklyfell in love, and the couple took off on a cocaine- and ayahuasca-fueled journey to the Amazon rainforest, bringing Sia’s daughter Season with them. Sia often disappeared on cocaine binges, leaving Anne and Season alone for days at a time. Over their 16-month journey, Anne became a mother to the girl. 

But her biological children were growing up without her. Jennifer, the youngest, struggled. Her father enrolled her in boarding school because she was a “handful,” Anne said.

“I remember writing them letters from the Amazon,” she said. “But I’ve always felt guilty because I didn’t raise them. Their father did.”

Anne returned to San Francisco, and in the early 1990s, moved just outside the Tenderloin. The promise of liberation that had drawn so many to the city two decades earlier had dimmed. In its place was a harder landscape scarred by the AIDS crisis and a drug scene that felt no longer like rebellion but ruin.

Though Anne had been largely absent from their lives for years, Jennifer and her brother, Garrett, followed her to San Francisco after high school. Jennifer took a job at the Pipe Dreams smoke shop on Haight Street and eventually moved into Anne’s apartment building. Anne tried to make up for lost time with her children. She grew especially close to Garrett, who joined the city’s vibrant gay community. 

“It was wonderful,” Anne recalled. “For a while.” 

Her two children were quickly swept up in the crises of the time. Garrett became sick with HIV and died of AIDS in 1994. Following his death, Jennifer spiraled into a meth addiction, then homelessness. 

Jennifer blamed Anne, who also blamed herself. Unable to help her own children, she directed her maternal instincts into the Tenderloin. She volunteered at Glide Memorial Church on Ellis Street, collecting and donating over 5,000 socks, hoping she might run into Jennifer among the homeless congregation. But she never showed.

Years passed, and the Tenderloin changed around Anne. By May 2021, she was afraid to leave her apartment. The Willow Street alley below her home had become host to the city’s largest homeless encampment. At its peak, more than 50 people camped along the three-block stretch between Larkin and Franklin streets, while many more drifted in and out throughout the day. At least 17 have died of fentanyl overdoses there in the past five years.

Watching from her seventh-story window, Anne felt helpless as the chaos unfolded below her home. Her compassion for those struggling with addiction ran deep; in their faces, she saw her daughter. She also saw others taking advantage of the chaos, selling drugs and stolen bicycles from their tents. She read online about violent attacks within a few hundred yards of her front door. At night, she heard loud explosions and people screaming. 

“I feel a little bit like a target at this point in my life,” Anne said. 

Anne wasn’t alone in that sentiment. Her neighbors were taking matters into their own hands, installing hostile sprinklers and immovable planters to block camping access on public rights of way. Parents in the Tenderloin rallied at City Hall for more police intervention, joining a growing chorus of residents calling for accountability. 

“A lot of people on drugs, they never seem to take responsibility for themselves,” Anne said. “It always seems to be blaming others.”

Anne’s perspective was hardening, but still she held out hope for Jennifer. She took her knitting sessions to the front porch, sparking conversations with homeless people, handing out treats for their dogs.

That summer, a woman with a toothless smile approached Anne and hugged her. She smelled of cigarettes, her voice was graveled, and her clothes were in tatters. For years, Anne had waited for this moment — the day her daughter returned home. But she didn’t recognize the woman standing before her.

“Have I seen you before?” Anne asked.

“It’s been a couple of years,” the woman replied.

It was Jennifer. But by the time Anne realized, her daughter was already gone. Anne was too physically weak by then to give chase. She was comforted that Jennifer knew where she was. Though she didn’t know yet it would be the last time they saw each other.

Anne met Michael Fittro two years later, at a Glide Sunday service. Michael could hardly see at the time — he was homeless, addicted to meth, and had lost his eyeglasses. His drug habit had pushed him into a deep isolation. He was in debt to his dealers. He stole from friends. His own mother had tried repeatedly to help him, but he resisted. He blamed his father for abandoning him as a child. He felt unworthy of love. And with every failed attempt to kick his drug habit, he drowned further in shame. At his lowest, he contemplated ending his life. 

Michael cried as he told the crowd gathered in Anne’s living room in March how she had saved him from his spiral. For reasons he still doesn’t fully understand, he felt comfortable confiding in her. They became fast friends, chosen family, uniting in a shared trauma of grief and estrangement. Each time he relapsed, she welcomed him into her home without judgment.

“I know you’ve mentioned that you lived in this apartment because maybe Jennifer will come back. But for me, you’ve been here, and so I’ve always known there’s a home to go to,” Michael said to Anne and the group. “I was running around all cross-eyed and high as hell, and you have loved me every step of the way.”

Before Michael’s father died, the two were able to make amends. But Anne and Jennifer would never have that chance.

The room fell silent as Anne wiped away her tears. 

“I’ll miss you all,” she said. “But I’m just so tired.” 

The encampments below her home were long gone. Though overdose data suggests the city’s drug problem remains at a crisis level, it is far less visible since police and officials stepped up enforcement of public drug use and encampments. And at a certain point, San Franciscans decided it was time to move on.

Over the last year, Anne too began to slowly back away from her hope in Jennifer, and in San Francisco. She stopped attending Glide. She no longer spent time on the stoop. After deciding to end her life, she made a plan to give her last $1,000 away in cash to homeless people on the street, in the Tenderloin community she’d called home for decades. But a week before her going-away party, she scuttled that plan. Too tired, too scared.

As the guests filtered out, Anne prepared an altar of items to take into the next life: a feather, a cloth from the Amazon, a picture of Garrett, but nothing to signify Jennifer.

In Jennifer’s place, Season, whom Anne had carried across the Amazon forest as a little girl, stewarded her cosmic mother’s transition. At around 7:30 p.m., Season mixed the lethal powder into a glass of water and handed the cocktail of sedatives, painkillers, and anesthetics to Anne. The apartment had become a sanctuary commemorating her life. Handwritten notes from loved ones were scattered across the table by her final resting place. In the living room, her cat Sophie basked in the evening sun beneath the orchids. 

“I asked her if she wanted to write anything for Jennifer before she died,” Season said a few days later. “She told me, ‘No, I’ve done everything that I can.’” Anne still didn’t know if Jennifer was alive or dead, but if it were the latter, she hoped her daughter might be waiting for her in the afterlife. The city medical examiner has no record for Jennifer Ball.

Sometime before 8 p.m. on March 9, Anne’s heartbeat slowed to a stop. Season held her in silence, feeling for a pulse, which had become indistinguishable from her own. Anne’s body lay so peacefully, she said, it was difficult to tell exactly when it was over. 

She had left San Francisco much the way she’d come to it decades ago — seeking freedom and by her own choice.