Not long ago, I made a visit to the cemetery with three assistant public guardians. We stood by ourselves against a steel gray sky to bid farewell to Gennie Pilarski.

Gennie's life will never be the subject of legends, yet Illinois residents should know what she endured in the name of psychotherapy under state care and all of us should silently pledge that no one else ever be similarly treated.

Gennie Pilarski's death came a few days short of her 80th birthday. She passed away quietly in an obscure nook of an obscure nursing home, no friends or relatives left to mourn her.

I met Gennie in 1978, shortly after I was appointed public guardian of Cook County, though "met" is not the correct term. Gennie was incapable of any kind of human interaction and responded to my presence by keeping her head buried beneath her blanket while mumbling incoherently.

The pattern didn't change over the next 20 years. Whenever one of our social workers visited her, Gennie either was buried under her bedclothes or roaming the halls of her nursing home, drooling and babbling.

Technically, our office should not have assumed responsibility for her care. We act as attorneys for the county's abused and neglected children; we also serve as guardians and oversee the estates of about 400 elderly adults suffering from senile dementia.

Although Gennie had no estate, we sort of inherited her case, but after I met her I found it impossible to pass her on to another agency. Her fate haunted me. We remained her guardian until death.

The Gennie I knew bore no resemblance to the 25-year-old woman who had originally come to the attention of the state. According to Department of Mental Health records, that Gennie had completed three years of college at the University of Illinois when, in 1944, she and her parents had a disagreement about where she should live, and they decided to commit her to a state psychiatric facility.

Upon her admission, a physician noted that Gennie was "neat, clean, tidy. Extremely quiet but friendly and agreeable. Cooperative in ward and routine." Later, he charted "no signs of active pathology."

Records from those years are incomplete, but reading between the lines one is led to surmise that Gennie was an exceedingly bright young person, among the relatively few women attending the University of Illinois. It appears that she wished to live on her own and away from her parents, but at the same time may have been suffering from episodes of manic-depressive disorder.

Today, that illness often can be controlled by medication, allowing many patients to work, raise their families and lead relatively normal lives.

Shortly after her admission, a therapist asked Gennie if life was worth living.

"What I have of it is," she replied. She felt normal, she said, "except for the stigma of insanity." The examiner, probing for paranoid tendencies, asked if she had any enemies.

"Everyone has," Gennie said. Her brother, for instance, was an enemy because he had threatened to hurt her. Her father was an enemy because he had beaten her up, slapped her and torn the clothes off her back. And her mother?

Gennie said she didn't know if her mother was an enemy. When asked if anyone had ever tried to poison her, Gennie responded: "I have eaten things I don't like, but I wouldn't call that poisoning."

The therapist asked Gennie what she would do if she were released from the "insane asylum," as Gennie called it. Gennie said she would like to have a job, clothes, some books. She would buy powder and rouge, and have some teeth extracted.

When asked to explain the difference between a tree and bush, Gennie said: "A bush is a small plant and a tree is a large plant."

When asked the difference between a lie and a mistake, she asserted, "A mistake is a casual error; a lie is a deliberate, conscious attempt to twist the truth for personal gain."

What was the difference between laziness and idleness?

"I don't know," she said.

The therapist noted that Gennie had repeated a statement--the same statement--several times during the examination: "A person that is 25 years old should be away from family entanglements."

In a paragraph marked "Sexual Trends," the therapist noted that Gennie had said, "I don't want a boyfriend." He concluded that she was oriented as to time, place and person, and had good memory and retention. She was neat and clean in appearance, tidy in her personal habits, cooperative.

Estimating her intellectual capacity, he wrote: "Counting and calculation were all done rapidly and well. Patient has attended the University of Illinois for three years as a chemistry major."

Several months later Gennie was subjected to hydrotherapy--repeatedly plunged in and out of ice water. Afterward, she asked: "Is life a farce?"

By VJ-Day in August 1945, Gennie had been given 40 insulin coma "treatments" and undergone 14 bouts of electroshock therapy, in addition to her hydrotherapy.

How had she responded?

A physician wrote that Gennie was "idle, rather unfriendly, does not mingle, occasionally talks in a very disagreeable way to the other patients. . . . She is not especially neat or clean."

In the early 1950s, she was placed in a research ward at Manteno State Hospital. At the time, physicians from various Illinois universities experimented on patients (involuntarily) in attempts to discover what could cure mental illness.

By May 1953 Gennie Pilarski had "completed 187 electric shock therapies in two times a week maintenance series."

On February 18, 1955, the chart noted: "Has had extensive neurosurgery with bilateral extirpation of most of frontal and temporal lobes. . . . Now mute, totally dependent on commands for functioning of everything from toilet urges on up. To be given an experimental course of (electric convulsive therapy) to see if any affective change can be brought about."

None was reported. Not after her lobotomy and seven more bouts of shock therapy. About year later, a doctor described Gennie as "confused, unresponsive, needs supervision because of wandering. Has to be led and helped. Unsuitable for further research." (Emphasis added).

For the next 45 years, this once-intelligent and sensitive woman moved from ward to ward, nursing home to nursing home, incoherent and incontinent, plagued by demons only she could understand, terrors that kept her hiding under her bedclothes.