Those who let Vacaville’s Mark Rippee die homeless should have been at memorial service | Opinion

Most of those who should have attended Mark Rippee’s gut-wrenching and also highly political Friday memorial service weren’t there.

So they didn’t have to hear the mothers, sisters and wives of seriously mentally ill Californians crying out not to heaven, but to Sacramento. Where state officials have systematically denied any meaningful help to those like Mark, who died homeless in his hometown on Nov. 29.

It was a 1987 motorcycle accident — a hit-and-run on a country road when he was only 24 — that stole first Mark’s sight and then his sanity. Yet it was on purpose that officials ignored the heroic efforts of his sisters to get him the treatment that his schizophrenia kept him from knowing he needed.

That’s because he also suffered from anosognosia, a condition associated with severe mental illness, which deprives those who have it from understanding that they are ill rather than under assault. Mark’s delusions convinced him that his only problems were a lack of housing and the trash-talking extraterrestrials that he thought were broadcasting to him from military submarines. Which is no more irrational than the laws that let officials hide behind the high-minded yet also highly convenient notion that in doing nothing, they were honoring Mark’s right to refuse treatment.

Mark’s sisters and parents structured their lives around caring for him themselves through more than 60 surgeries for the first 20 years after his accident. But eventually, the voices that led Mark to set fires made that impossible. The day he attacked his mother with an ax because he was sure she was an imposter, he lost both his last lease and his county-funded aide.

His sisters never gave up on him; they called, waylaid, lobbied and tried to educate every city, county and state official they could. Yet because our health care system also seems to suffer from anosognosia, they were refused at every turn, and denied the public conservatorship that would and should have been funded by Solano County.

‘Britney Spears can be conserved, and Mark Rippee cannot?’

It’s not surprising that none of those officials who felt so bad but did so little were among the 120 who did show up at Mark’s service at the Vacaville Moose Lodge, not far from where he spent most of the last 15 years sleeping outside the local county building.

That way, they didn’t have to hear Mark’s mother, Lou Rippee, recall her only son as “such a good little boy,” or his sister Catherine Rippee-Hanson describe him as “the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

In her eulogy, Catherine remembered him at age 7, “standing by the creek at the railroad tracks pointing down at me in the muddy water where I stood catching tadpoles while he proudly yelled to his friends, ‘That’s my sister! She’s not afraid of anything!’” Good thing, as it turned out.

Those who let Mark die weren’t there to hear Catherine’s twin, Linda Privatte, share her feelings of guilt over “not being able to change his circumstances.” Yes, though it’s impossible to imagine how she could have done more.

The officials she and Catherine had begged to intervene didn’t have to see the photos of Mark as an adorable kid in a superhero cape, or as a smiling teenager posing with his guitar.

They didn’t have to hear from Vacaville teacher Faun Schlosser, who said we should refuse to vote for any candidate willing to accept the inhumanity of the status quo. Her husband, who also suffers from a serious mental illness, is thriving now, she said, but only after “20 years of fighting with Kaiser Permanente.”

“I get why they shut the institutions; they were awful.” But then, so is letting people die out of some sort of perverse reverence for their delusions. What kind of a system, she asked, decrees that “someone like Britney Spears can be conserved and Mark Rippee cannot? That infuriates me,” she said through angry tears.

Nor did those who’d done nothing for Mark have to hear from Teresa Pasquini, a Contra Costa County advocate for her son Danny and so many others. “We have tried everything in our power for years to provide care in our own homes, but it is impossible without professional help. When we ask for help, we are told to wait for every other disabled population to be helped first. When we explain that our gravely disabled loved ones lack the insight to voluntarily accept help, we are told that the ‘A’ word, anosognosia, isn’t real.

When we ask for assisted outpatient care, we are told it is coercive and you have to fail multiple times before you are worthy of medically necessary treatment in a hospital bed instead of an outdoor asylum or jail cell. We are told that if we just love them enough, provide peer support and a roof, then they will recover. But families like mine know that is a big lie.”

“Please join us in Mark’s name,” she said, “and never forget, he was a son, a brother, an uncle, a friend. He was a man.”

Will this death force changes for the seriously mentally ill?

That support is mostly withheld out of ignorance and passivity rather than any malign intent does not change anything.

But those who had come to mourn James Mark Rippee’s preventable death at age 59 swore that the shameful story of how he died will force change now. At the time he died, of multiple organ failure after an untreated urinary tract infection caused sepsis, Mark had been paying some local opportunist $600 a month to let him sleep in his backyard, along with a bunch of other homeless people. No one knows who brought him to the hospital, unable to breathe, long after he should have had medical care.

The one state official who did attend the memorial was state Sen. Susan Eggman, who met Mark after I wrote about him last summer. She spoke plainly about the damage done by replacing a system of warehousing the seriously mentally ill with … nothing.

“At one time, we thought they were solving a problem,” but then we “created a whole other world of problems. We’ve turned a blind eye, and said no, they have rights. And Mark, like so many others, died with his rights on.”

“Let us have Mark’s living and dying be one more step” toward fixing the laws that let him die, Eggman said. “You have my commitment” to make sure that happens.

She’s hopeful, she said, that this year, her colleagues will pass her bill, which would amend the absurd and abusive current official definition of the phrase “gravely disabled.” Right now, each county is free to interpret that term as meaning that anyone still able to feed himself and seek shelter — under a bush, or on a piece of cardboard — is well enough to make decisions about his own care.

Catherine Moy, the mayor of Fairfield, lamented that she hadn’t been able to get Solano County to help Mark. “There was a block that all of us who were elected failed to knock down,” she said, “and that’s why Mark’s dead.” But now, she said, “we will not hear the word ‘no’ any more about this waste of humanity.”

“I’ll never let it go,” she said, “mostly because of Mark.” None of us ever should.

This story was originally published January 15, 2023 at 5:00 AM.