Elsewhere, friend's pain ends in peace

Phil Wiggins always wanted to "ride out." On Monday afternoon, he did, for good.

Wiggins is the 65-year-old man with schizophrenia whose odyssey from a psychiatric hospital to a group home in Zebulon I've charted for nearly five years. He died peacefully Monday after a struggle with lung cancer.

He'd waged a long and far more torturous battle with severe mental illness.

By allowing readers to follow his journey, he became a symbol of what was right, and wrong, with the mental health system of our state.

The message of Phil Wiggins' life: When the system treated him like a person, he became one. He also became my friend.

The first time I met Wiggins, he sat in a chair rocking and mumbling, rubbing his head as if to clear it of voices.

In his rare lucid moments, he would break in on serious discussions with doctors to ask his sister, Louise Jordan: "What do you say, Louise? You ready to ride out?"

It was a pattern formed over more than four decades of visits to state psychiatric facilities -- a pattern at once vexing and endearing to a sister who has been his sole guardian for all of their adult lives.

So last week, when Wiggins, preparing to have his lungs drained of liters of fluid, asked Jordan over and over whether she would take him out, she promised, "Yes, Phil, I'll take you."

She kept her word.

On Sunday, when Wiggins was being released from intensive care to a hospice room, Jordan fended off the nurses, wrapped her brother in warm blankets and briefly wheeled him outside on the grounds of Rex Hospital.

Jordan knelt in front of his wheelchair and said, "Phil, do you see that we're outside?"

He was drugged -- and sleepy. But he looked up. And he nodded.

He knew.

Jordan never let him down.

The siblings' bond

Orphaned in early childhood, brother and sister had a bond that is hard to explain. He was the big brother, but she was mother, sister, friend.

Wiggins first entered Dorothea Dix as a teenager. In those days, the medicines were debilitating; he was subjected to electroshock therapy.

He learned to smoke. He was fascinated with fire and clogging up toilets with paper. He frequently wandered off the grounds. One day Jordan visited to find the staff had removed all of Wiggins' teeth -- he was convinced his fillings were relaying the voices he heard in his head.

Even in the ICU, days before his death, he was convinced the oxygen mask was blowing fire into his nostrils.

But in the past few years, following his release from state psychiatric hospitals, the young man with whom Jordan grew up re-emerged from time to time. His sly humor peeked out from the cloud of paranoia and delusion.

He had the chance, in his 60s, to do things he'd never imagined: soaking in a bubble bath, visiting the beach, riding an escalator at the mall.

He recognized me when I came to visit and ask my nettlesome questions. We met at the library and at Ruby Tuesday's. I watched him plant his first garden. We drank coffee at Starbucks.

He guzzled my Dunkin' Donuts coffee at the last meeting we sat through together. Then, true to form, he asked Jordan if it wasn't time to go on and ride out.

He read the columns I wrote about him online. With the help of his community-based worker, he sent me thank-you notes by e-mail.

But the greatest thanks go to Wiggins himself, whose story helped illustrate both the promise and the continued challenges in the state's effort to reform its mental health system.

Because of his case, many severely mentally ill patients will receive extra assistance by applying for funds previously used only for the developmentally disabled.

The tightrope

That was a rare victory. It came through the same week doctors found a grapefruit-size tumor in Wiggins' lung.

Over the years, Jordan told me, she felt like she was walking a tightrope as her brother's keeper -- cajoling, complaining, praising, prodding. She often wept at the services given and then yanked away.

Wiggins couldn't bear to see his sister's tears. Even from his hospital bed, he watched her carefully. "You all right, Louise?" he'd ask.

"Somebody needs to cry for you, Phil," she told him on Saturday. He told her he was crying on the inside.

On Monday afternoon, as he died, his sister lay next to him, her arm wrapped around a body wasted and shrunken by disease.

She listened as his heart, and his mind, fell quiet. Finally, after all these years, at peace.

She had told him Sunday, "I love you, Phil." He'd responded in his funny, formal way, "I do love you too, Louise."