9/4/23

Dear family members of Tammy:

I was very saddened to hear of Tammy’s  untimely passing. Up until the second to last time I saw her, she was very much herself, even though she was quite weak. She was still in large part cheerful, happy to see me and others, and grateful.  She did cry when I left, which was out of character for her, and though I visited once more, we never spoke again.

I knew her a very long time, more than half my life. She was in my program at Mount Carmel Guild starting in 1987 or 1988. Even after I stopped working there, she came to my father’s funeral on Long Island in 1993. A year and half later when  my family visited her at Broadway apartments in Newark, she held my infant daughter Emily in her arms, New Year’s eve 1994. Since then, we have crossed paths many times. She was a student in my academic department at UMDNJ, earning an Associate’s degree, a board member at Project Live, a staff person in PACT and residential services, a co-presenter at conferences, she helped with data collection on a study. She spoke intelligently and insightfully about complicated things. When she was well, she always saw the best in others.. She kept up with me and my life, calling out of the blue, staying on the phone too long. I once told her I talk to her longer than I do my own family. There was also fun, seeing the cherry blossoms in Branch Brook Park.

She was witty, intelligent, and difficult. To say she was a character is an understatement. A fantastic memory, which could  be a curse as well as a blessing. Every time I saw her, she inquired about mutual friends and my family, sometimes people she had not seen in decades. She wanted to know, she cared. She had a  form of severe and persistent serious mental illness that crossed diagnostic boundaries, defying traditional labels and therapies. She suffered from many psychotic and affective symptoms that were very difficult to control, sometimes impossible to manage. Like many  with these disorders, it was sometimes difficult to know if it was the illness speaking or her true self. Was she genuinely upset or delusional? Often, I figured it out after the fact. While a genuinely spiritual person, she could also have religious delusions of inordinate guilt. She could also be suspicious at a :normal level or paranoid in the extreme. A few years ago, my wife Miriam invited her to dinner at our home. Tammy was unduly appreciative, when my Miriam and I visited her at Clara Maass and she brightened up in no time despite her severe side effects at the time. Recently, Tammy asked to see her, but when Miriam visited, Tammy did not recognize her was literally afraid of her and hid from her. Her symptoms in the extreme after  a “drug holiday” for other treatment. The next time she saw me, Tammy apologized. She had an awareness of her symptoms after the fact,  leading to the misconception in others that she could control them, but like many people while there is a level of awareness,  it is rarely during the acute phases.

She was intelligent and ambitious and a testament to human resilience. She had a grossly unfair life with many adverse events, yet remained cheerful, grateful, and optimistic. At times, she had me convinced he would beat mental illness and cancer. At Optima, when she was still doing well, she was like the mayor of the unit, volunteering to help the recreational therapist.

Like so many people with serious mental illness, her untimely and premature demise was not due to the disorder itself,  but other illnesses afflicting other bodily systems. It is all too common that the overall health of people like her is not taken seriously enough and perhaps the psychiatric disorder is over-emphasized.

She had a great sense of humor, laughed at herself and at other people’s jokes. She cared for others, especially friends older than her. She enriched my life, challenging me and the assumptions I made. Tammy’s life  was a great testament to human persistence in the face of overwhelming odds, but her story also highlights the unrelenting nature of these disorders, and despite her many efforts to recover from mental illness, it would return to overwhelm and torture her much of her life. While she had moments of independence, even years, she also spent an inordinate amount of her life institutionalized.

Her life reminds me that in the last 30 or 40 years of the incomplete promise of psychopharmacology We do not seem to be moving towards a cure. Even with the addition of psychosocial interventions and the numerous self-help endeavors Tammy engaged in to promote her own recovery, taking every advantage of what someone like her could do, every peer activity and intervention; the illness still often won.

The basic injustice of serious mental illness extends to you, her family. Families are deprived of seeing their loved one’s full potential come to fruition, and the experience her many losses . They have often expended, as you folks did, a great deal of their resources to help her, as well emotion.

People asked me  recently, who is she to me? A dear friend, yes, it was a real two-way street.  But more than that. I have a large extended family of first cousins, some of whom I am close to and very fond of, shared history and stories,  joking round, able to “pick up” readily even after a long absence from each other. Yes, she was a bit like that to me.

Affectionately,

Ken Gill