February 3, 2010
In 1996, Jan and Don Burns discuss an independent panel’s report on the slaying of their mentally ill daughter at AMHI.
It was 14 years ago this spring. A few days earlier, Jan's daughter Wrendy Hayne, a longtime resident at what was then the Augusta Mental Health Institute, had been brutally murdered by Harold Pulsifer, another AMHI resident.
And now here Jan sat, staring at the old family photos on her dining room table, recalling how the unpredictable twists and turns of schizophrenia so often had left Wrendy cowering in her mother's arms.
"I'd hold her and say, 'It's all right, honey. It's only a delusion. It will pass,' " Jan recalled through her tears that day. "Then she'd say, 'But when, Mumma? When?'"
Jan Burns died from emphysema and heart disease Sunday evening at a hospice in Scarborough. And as her family lays her to rest today, we'd all do well to remember not just what happened all those years ago to her daughter – but also what Jan did about it.
"Jan should have died six years ago," Don Burns, Jan's husband of just under 25 years, said Tuesday over breakfast at Denny's Restaurant. "But she had work to do. There's no other explanation for her surviving this long."
Make no mistake about it. As a grass-roots advocate for the mentally ill, Jan Burns spoke her mind – loudly and often.
For more than a decade, she and her husband poured their grief into the Wrendy Hayne Fund – an endowment that grew out of the family's $620,000 settlement with the state after Pulsifer was convicted and sentenced to 28 years in the Maine State Prison. (By the time the lawyers were paid and the family distribution was complete, Don's and Jan's share of the settlement was a lot less than people might think.)
Administered through the Maine Community Foundation, the $100,000 fund is by no means huge. But its long list of grant recipients - Amistad, Shalom House and Counseling Services Inc., to name a few – are proof positive that the Burnses' sometimes contentious negotiations with the state had nothing to do with their own personal gain.
"It was never about the money," Don said. "After Wrendy's death, we really saw that we had to accomplish something in her name. It had to mean something."
Hence if there was a walk to benefit the mentally ill, Jan not only walked, but also took care of the food table.
If the Maine Legislature held a hearing on a bill dealing with mental health, Jan would be there – ready, willing and quite able to give lawmakers her two cents worth on what was working (and what wasn't).
And if help was needed at a shelter, a jail, a soup kitchen or one of the many other places where those with mental illness tend to surface in this post-institutional era, Jan was there, without being asked, to lend a hand.
Sitting across from Don, Penny Hayne, Jan's daughter, said her parents' house in Parsonsfield is still stuffed with used clothing that her mother regularly collected, cleaned and donated to the York County Shelter – even after respiratory problems confined Jan to a motorized scooter.
"Even though she couldn't walk, she kept collecting clothes and having us drop them off to the shelter," Penny said.
(It didn't stop there. After Jan and Don donated money to build a wheelchair ramp at the shelter, the leftover funds were used to create the shelter's Wrendy Hayne Garden.)
Truth be told, it's rare that a woman like Jan finds her way onto the public stage.
By the time she met Don back in the 1980s - they worked together as nurse's aides at Devonshire Manor in Portland – she was a twice-divorced single mother of five who knew little about mental illness before Wrendy, her oldest, began showing signs of schizophrenia at age 12. But that changed fast.
"If you go back and look at the Portland and South Portland library records, you'll find that she checked out every book on mental illness that there was," Don said.
No surprise, then, that by the time Wrendy was at AMHI and a summer heat wave killed five patients there in 1988, Jan was appointed by then-Gov. John R. McKernan to serve on the Maine Mental Health Commission.
During one session, she told fellow commissioners how the AMHI staff had scrambled to clean up Wrendy's squalid ward upon learning that Jan was bringing a news photographer on her next visit. They even placed a fluffy teddy bear atop Wrendy's dresser.
"It wasn't hers," Jan, anything but impressed, told the commission. "But a nice touch!"
It was that kind of humor, honed to just the right degree of sharpness, that got Jan noticed. But it was her determination to turn her daughter's horrible death into something positive that will be her legacy.
Gov. John Baldacci recalled Tuesday how moved he was by Jan's and Don's dignified demeanor when Baldacci helped dedicate a bench in Wrendy's honor on the grounds of AMHI – now the home of the state-run Riverview Psychiatric Center.
"Jan was a regular Maine person who felt a need to make her voice heard – and did it in a very effective way," Baldacci said. "It touched my heart. It really did."
State Sen. Joseph Brannigan, D-Portland, remembers how, before he retired last year as executive director of Shalom House, which provides housing and other services for people with mental illness, the Burnses established a scholarship for the agency's therapeutic art program.
After Wrendy was killed, Brannigan noted, nobody would have blamed the Burnses for retreating from the limelight.
"But they didn't hide," he said. "They did what they could to make things better."
Commissioner Brenda Harvey of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services said that as sad as she was to learn of Jan's death, she was grateful to have worked with her.
"She offered insight, wisdom, passion and inspiration, responding to a tragedy in a positive way that impacted many lives," Harvey said. "I admired her courage and resolve to help move the mental health system towards recovery."
Much more will be said about Jan when her family and friends gather today at noon at Hobbs Funeral Home in South Portland to bid her farewell.
Don will recall that in addition to being the love of his life and a force to be reckoned with, "she had great-looking legs."
He'll also note that "there are a lot of people who think the same way Jan thought and believe the same things Jan believed. But there aren't too many people who act on what they think and believe like Jan did."
Granddaughter Brooke, Penny's oldest, will recall that if Grammy hadn't started taking her to volunteer at the soup kitchen on Preble Street in Portland when Brooke was only 6, she probably wouldn't be doing it to this day.
Penny, a medical technician who serves clients with mental illness and mental disabilities, will tell how many of the treatment strategies she uses today are rooted in the common-sense explanations she'd get when she'd ask her mother, "What's wrong with Wrendy?"
And numerous others will tell how Jan more than once did what nobody else had the time or inclination to do -- in their moment of greatest need, she listened.
Just before she died, Jan made Penny promise that the many awards and mementos she's received along the way will be displayed at her funeral. (Except for that letter Baldacci sent her last fall after she fell and broke her shoulder. "Leave that one at home," Jan said over her oxygen machine. "That's too embarrassing.")
One item will stand out above the rest.
It's a duplicate of the key to the main entrance at AMHI, presented by state officials to Jan when the facility finally closed in 2004. Ever since, it's hung on a photo of an eternally smiling Wrendy.
"I remember the day they gave it to her," Penny said. "They told her, 'What happened to Wrendy will never happen again.'"
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at: bnemitz@mainetoday.com
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