George Eric Peer

Celebrating My Brother

My brother, George Eric Peer, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He died just short of his 75th birthday. When he was young he had a wonderful life full of promise, but as his illness progressed he had a hard and lonely life. My thinking of what to celebrate about my brother’s life quite often gets sidetracked by the many awful things that happened as a result of his illness. He had many personal crises with his condition, too many bad reactions to the drugs he was given and too many hospitalizations.

He was very bright and inquisitive. Our family camped a lot when we were young. We visited Eastern Canada, the Canadian Rockies and the Western US. He was a Boy Scout and attended the 1964 Jamboree in Valley Forge and Camp Massawepie in the Adirondacks. He loved the outdoors, hiking, topographical maps and chopping wood. As we got older, our family trail hiked through Isle Royale National Park in Michigan and back-paced in Baxter State Park in Maine. He taught me how to identify a Mountain Maple, made plaster casts of wild animal tracks and identified the Burdock growing outside his nursing home.

My brother was one of the science fair winners in middle school. He graduated from Eastridge in 1968 with a Regents scholarship despite a hospitalization for his mental illness that interrupted his high school years. He was accepted at Stony Brook University on Long Island, which he attended for a short time. He always wanted to return to school and tried to do that, but his thinking was disorganized and he had trouble communicating. He spent a good deal of time requesting college catalogs and studying their offerings. For fun, he liked to visit libraries. He would take out the biggest books, or as many books as he could carry. He would immerse himself in a book and surround himself with other books. Towards the end, he seemed to use the titles of books to express what he was anxious about, which was his impending death.

Now, I celebrate my brother most by listening to the music I heard coming from his room when we were young. I thought he was a wonderful flute player, and I love flute music. I also loved listening to the records he played by Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, The Byrds, The Sandpipers, and Simon and Garfunkel and many other artists. I can imagine hearing Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn -A Time for Every Season” performed by The Byrds and taken from Ecclesiastes playing in his room at our house. I love the music on the records that he gave me as gifts. Some were by It’s A Beautiful Day and the Lovin Spoonful. He seemed to prefer music to TV, and still enjoyed listening to CDs and the radio at his nursing home.

He was not good at mechanical things and rarely turned things that were on off or locked doors. He liked bicycling and driving though, and he was good at navigating around the city. He even drove a van to pick up other patients for therapy. He was able to drive our father to the hospital when our father was having a heart attack. I felt guilty for taking away his keys when safety became an issue and there was no one monitoring that at the facility where he was living. After my brother no longer drove, he was an annoyingly cautious back seat driver.

I would color with him when I visited his nursing home as a stress reliever. He didn’t always like to color or color within the lines, but how he colored seemed to express how he felt. I learned that his favorite color was yellow, a color my father also liked. He liked eating and might order the most expensive thing on the menu if you took him out. He still seemed to appreciate a good meal or snack at the nursing home despite his swallowing problems and had said how nice it was to have clean clothes daily. He liked nice sweaters, down jackets, knit hats, and still wished for hiking boots even when they

were no longer practical.

At one point, my brother had an apartment, a girlfriend he cared for, a job, and a car. But that didn’t last, and he returned to live at home with our parents. Our mother was at one time Chemistry Librarian at RIT and our father was a chemist at Kodak. Our mother died in March, 1982. My brother continued to live with our father and attended various mental health programs around the city until our father died in March, 2000. After that, my brother lived at East House in Irondequoit, then Parkside in East Rochester. He was a client of Strong Ties and the MIPS Clinic, who provided therapy and medical care. I returned to Rochester in January, 2011 and began visiting him more often. When his health declined, he was moved to assisted living at the Shire in Irondequoit. After a hospitalization for swallowing difficulties, he went to Wedgewood Nursing Home and Rehab in Spencerport till his death on May 2, 2025.

I struggle with the fact that my father wanted my brother to always live in a home setting rather than a facility, which was not feasible especially when I had my own health problems to deal with. Still, I think he would have been impressed that Rochester now has mental health facilities like Parkside. In East Rochester, my brother was able to walk around town to the library, to nearby shops and to go out to eat or to get a haircut. I was also impressed by how many dedicated, caring individuals worked at all the facilities that were involved in my brother’s care. Bad things happened as my father predicted they would, but good things happened as well. 

Thank you to the many caregivers and medical professionals who provided help over the years and to those who planned for community care for the mentally ill.

Please honor my brother as you would like to.

Vicki (Peer) Voss