The Seminar

Tammy

September 5th, 2023

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
My Grandparents were “green”

August 10th, 2023

I can still hear my grandmother’s voice, “Don’t throw that away, that’s good garbage.”

Good garbage?

What she meant was organic matter. The way station for it was a cardboard milk carton on the kitchen counter, not the garbage pail. Next stop was the compost pile (however, no one said “composting”). Kitchen scraps, dried leaves, grass clippings, egg shells, coffee grinds all rotted and then went through a mulcher on the way to the vegetable garden. The garden soil was supplemented by manure, usually acquired at no cost from a horse track, and on a few occasions, chicken farms, with vile results.

Born in 1897 and 1903 respectively, they saved and re-used everything. They did not waste anything: electricity, oil, natural gas, water, time, or money. Nothing was wasted. A surplus of cucumbers or eggplant from the garden resulted in pickling, Born of modest means, they were still great conservers even when they did not have to to be. Watering the vegetable garden resulted in produce, and thus allowable. Watering the lawn, just a waste. They also took good care of anything they owned. More than 40 years after grandpa’s death, I still use the old garden tools he did not abuse. Overall, they made the most of their resources and saved throughout their lives. They operated at a surplus.

Their vegetable gardening took place in some of the less than agriculturally hospitable places in metropolitan New York. Perhaps romantically, I saw it as originating in the hills of the Campagnia, the land of their parents. But I was wrong. It turned out it was the WW2 “victory gardens” that got my grandfather going on this “hobby”. Nevertheless, I still believe it stuck for four decades due to his heritage.

Their attitude was admittedly hard on some of us at times, who saw them as stingy and stuck in their ways. To my grandfather, there were three ways of doing things: the right way, the hardest way to do it, and his way. Of course, they were all the same way. Rarely, he granted immunity. I remember being startled when he unexpectedly approved the use of a roller to paint a fence, “even though you will waste a lot.”

I am indebted to my brother for the observation that they were green. At the time he said this, some people were taking umbrage at the phrase: “reduce, re-use, recycle,” probably because it was linked to a government mandate. Of course, you did not have to tell grandma and grandpa to “reduce” because they never used too much; re-use, they were most likely already re-using it; or recycle, they did not know the term. Yet, they were probably better at it than you or I and it did not involve a twice monthly curbside pick-up.

I have thought a bit about why they were so green, although that phrase they would not know. But I think I understand. They were smart enough to know what many of us have never grasped. They knew that their resources and those of the world are one in the same.
Convening the seminar

August 9th, 2023

More than a decade ago, I had a beverage-fueled, late Friday afternoon sessions with two dear, well-read friends. The little planning needed was done by e-mail. My employer, a university, had recently provided an ominous warning: “your e-mail is neither private nor secure.”

So I developed an ingenious, un-crackable code word for this gathering, “the seminar”. Very scholarly, eh. Of course, not really that ingenious a cover-up, given there are not many late Friday afternoon classes in higher education.

But it was apt, because we talked about and listened to each other on a wide variety of topics from personal challenges to politics, history, popular culture, religion, dogs, science, and the strategies of barflies to get buybacks…just about anything in the world was fair game. Thus, it was re-named the Seminar on World Affairs.

I will describe my co-conspirators in blunt terms. The first, I found to be surprisingly well-read and educated for an attorney. The second, I describe her as having the ability to take a male perspective surprisingly well for a woman. I was fortunate enough that these friends had the flexibility of viewpoint to consider these to be the compliments I intended.

Usually, each of us had read on the topic (or at least one thing) on the topics. We were like-minded enough, but also different enough, for a lively exchange. Extemporizing even when uninformed, and vehemently disagreeing on principle, were the best parts. This weekly fun continued for a number of years and achieved an almost “sacred” status in our my view.

Alas, it no longer meets. My two thoughtful, loquacious companions have been drawn away by the siren’s call of their many other interests. The “good old days,” if only we savored them when we lived them, but it will never be.

I occasionally find other less august gatherings. I participate in a virtual happy hour, founded during the pandemic shuttering of the public houses in. Held through video-teleconferencing, it admittedly sounds dreadful; surprisingly, it is not. Its participants are well-informed and articulate, the conversation is very engaging. It is outliving its necessity. But given the medium, it does not lend itself to either extended discourse or diatribe.

In short, is not “the seminar.”

Tammy

My Grandparents were “green”

Convening the seminar