Sep 112 min read

Dum Spiro Spero

“… but since it falls into my lot

that I should rise and you should not,

I’ll gently rise and softly call

good night and joy be to you all”

Tara Maureen Levis (05/12/1984 - 23/02/2024)

I had the blessing of knowing Tara over the last few years of her life. We first met in 2017, but 2020 on was when our lives truly began to intertwine. At that time we were both in the midst of significant struggle - ones we had known off and on for many years.

Even in the depths of suffering, Tara was always remarkably brilliant. Sometimes this brilliance was hidden behind layers of pain in the moment, but it was always there.

More than anything, I am beyond grateful to have had the chance to see her - what she chose to share with me - instead of just the challenges she faced, worn visibly. Tara was and was not what she struggled with - I will not erase what she faced every day nor the wish that she’d had an easier life to, but I also refuse to reduce her to it. She was always whole and complex and healing amidst struggling. She was living a life of everything all at once. Between the rift of every paradox you could imagine, she carved out life as best she could.

Grief is different for everyone and across each moment of the day. Mine is mixture of numbness and connection, rage at injustice alongside utter defeat, devastating sadness and the solidity of love - hopelessness and hope seen in a different light; as she taught me to find.

Tara taught me more about being resilient than either of us should have ever had to be. She taught me about self-compassion and forgiveness in a way that didn’t feel like yet another thing I was failing at. Both of us carried the weight of guilt for not healing within the bounds of a neat and tidy narrative. Both of us knew what it was to be given up on, pathologized, and excluded from what stories of “recovery” are “supposed” to be in the black and white world of standardized psychiatric care.

Tara did not lose her battle, she is not a sad story or a statistic. Her death is not a result of illness but of necropolitics and the intersection of multiple policy failures. More than anything, Tara was and will always be, a treasured human life.