Chapter 9 in a series on mental illness.
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My brother Tony took his own life on March 15, 2024 I am so sorry to say.
It is 10 years since my previous chapter chronicling Tony’s battle in life and everyone’s battle with our Mental Health Care system. I said that post would be the last in this blog. But now things are different. I feel compelled to at least say good bye Tony. And perhaps ask you dear reader what else you might like to know about Tony or to share your thoughts.
I began penning this on May 4, 2026, his birthday. It took me three months to hit the publish button.
It’s like it was yesterday. Everything I experienced with my brother as he dealt with his life and what people call mental illness is like it all happened yesterday. The whole thing passed in a flash. Life passes in a flash.
You learn many things about life and people and society and yourself when you confront a mental illness that has taken over someone you love. Somehow I am motivated to think and write more again about this whole thing called mental illness that so affected my brother and everyone who knew him. Not today and perhaps not in this format, I have more to say.
For now, there are no words and there are many words. They are all mixed up in my mind as I remember so much of Tony’s life, the parts of his life I know about.
Tony had been in the hospital for two nights and one day since the paramedics took him there. I had called 911 after finding Tony in his hotel room on the floor barely conscious. The nurse told me Tony was not stable enough the first night to communicate so I went in to visit him the next day. I’m unsure if Tony knew I was there. He was laying inclined in a bed looking straight forward with his eyes wide open. And he was saying something, more mumbling, rapidly saying something perhaps numbers mixed with words. I told him I love him and that he was in a hospital and getting treatment. I thought he could hear me but he did not respond or explicitly acknowledge my presence.
There was an attendant in the room when I first entered. He left while I visited Tony. He told me he was there all day and would be relieved at night. So Tony was being monitored 24 hours per day.
I stayed maybe a couple of hours. I hugged Tony before I left but I don’t think he acknowledged my hug. I told him he was being treated and that I would return the next day to see him again.
I don’t have a detailed memory of my interactions with Tony that day, March 16, 2026, beyond what I just said. I assumed that since he was in a good hospital and had an attendant at all times that in coming days he would recover from his overdose of Haldol pills. I did not ask to see a doctor although I had informed the ER the previous day that Tony had OD’d by consuming his entire bottle of haldol. It is not like me to not talk with the doctor. I do recall talking with the doctor a couple days later.
I left. My plan was to visit Tony again the next day when he would hopefully be more responsive.
The next morning I decided to do a short bicycle workout before going over to visit Tony again. It was about 8:30 am. I was on Ocean Avenue about one mile into my workout when my phone rang. I pulled my bicycle over to the side of the road and answered my phone.
A doctor told me that Tony’s heart had stopped beating. That Tony’s heart beat was being maintained artificially. That “the prognosis is not good”.
I clarified with the doctor that he was asking me to decide whether or not to continue artificially maintaining Tony’s heart beat.
“The prognosis is not good.”
I called Eric, Tony’s other older brother, my other younger brother. I conferenced Eric in to the call with the doctor.
“The prognosis is not good.”
We decided to ask the doctor to not maintain Tony’s heart beat artificially. We let Tony go.
I called a friend of mine who is a very experienced nurse and told her what the doctor had said. She knew Tony very well and loved him. She explained that the doctor was telling me that Tony would not make it. She had seen a photo I had taken of Tony, where his eyes were dilated looking straight ahead.
I now wonder why I did not ask or even think to ask the doctor to keep Tony’s heart beating artificially until I could go to the hospital and see Tony alive and somehow say goodbye.
“The prognosis is not good.”
It is hard for me to know what to say right now. I know I want to say more but maybe for another time, maybe in another form.
There is ten years of history since my previous chronical recorded in the previous “chapters” penned here. A few of you reading this may have read and commented on those chapters. And many of you have been in similar situations with people you love. You understand what I and other of Tony’s friends went through. Tony’s last ten years were a repeating cycle of being lucid while on meds for short periods and sometimes according to Tony being off meds but still staying lucid, only to break down again and again, be reincarcerated, and the cycle repeated. I will not repeat here my opinions previously expressed as to possible measures we should take, as a society, to do better than we have. A topic, one of many, for another time.
After the paramedics left with Tony in the ambulance, I stayed in the hotel room he had existed in during the past few weeks. I gathered together some clothing he had there and cleaned up the room a bit before letting the hotel manager, who was a nice man I had met a couple times, that I would be on my way.
Tony, I, and his oldest childhood friend Robert in Oregon had had a long video conference call little more than two days prior to Tony’s act. We discussed Tony’s recent guilt about some gambling he had fallen back into and the incumbent loneliness I feel Tony must have been experiencing. He has sent me a long text confessing his recent gambling. I had replied very positively encouraging him to continue his writing. He was an outstanding writer both of fiction and of perception of his own life. To the very end I was trying to encourage him to do more writing and suggested he would be able to earn income from it and we would help him.
My thoughts on this and other similar subjects are too complex to reiterate here and now. This is not the place to say anymore than that. That and many other similar subjects will be something I can go into in some other context and form. Perhaps a book.
The purpose of this post is to say Goodbye dearest Tony who we all loved so much.
I will part with one last image. As I cleaned up his hotel room I saw that he had improvised a way to keep some asparagus fresh in water in a plastic bag lining a small trash can. There was still several stalks of asparagus there. I still cry when I think of that asparagus in that improvised cooler in that bleak hotel room. What it represents about how he was living his life at the end.
The loneliness it represented. The desperation he must have felt. I so feel I could have done more. My friends tell me I did more than anyone and did all that was possible. I don’t know. That is for some other chapter in some other book. How to help the Mentally Ill.
I conclude my writing now by including this memorial to Tony we held on his birthday of two years ago, a couple months after he passed.
Dennis G. Allard
Santa Monica
May 4, 2026 updated August 17, 2026
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