When Pam Carpenter was 16, she volunteered to become a companion to an intellectually disabled teenager through the Jewish Social Service Agency in Rockville. But she never dreamed that she and her companion, Julie Tannen, were beginning a lifelong friendship.
Both women are now 65, and Carpenter, a Silver Spring resident, considers Tannen “family.”
“The program was designed for teens to take their friends out every Sunday afternoon,” says Carpenter, a retired preschool teacher who also worked at the Washington Design Center. “We tried various things, and it took a while to learn what Julie liked. Then, we found out Julie’s favorite thing to do was going to the park and riding the train, so we would do that.
“Julie was friendly and sweet.”
Early in their friendship, Carpenter took a vow that would change the course of both women’s lives.
“At the same time when I was volunteering with Julie, I was interning at a preschool,” she says. “I began thinking about the children and their mothers. And I asked myself, ‘How can you pass away when you have a child who in many ways will be a child forever?’”
The question got Carpenter thinking about Tannen and her mother, Ada Rhea Tannen, a Baltimore native.
“I told Julie’s mom that when she got older, I would always be there for her,” she says. “I’m not sure what her mom thought about what I told her, but for me it was a promise and I meant it.”
Carpenter emphasizes that she is “not some sort of saint. I’m far from it. But Julie is an amazing person, and she’s so easy to be with.”
In 1974, Tannen moved from Silver Spring to a life-sharing community in Virginia, and the weekly trips to the park stopped. But Tannen and Carpenter still kept in close contact. They spoke on the phone regularly and saw each other every time Tannen came to visit her mother in Silver Spring.
“So then we started doing Julie’s second favorite thing — going out to lunch,” says Carpenter.
Even after Carpenter married her husband, Eric, the visits continued, and Tannen built relationships with him and the couple’s children. In time, Eric Carpenter even built a makeshift bedroom in the family’s residence for whenever Tannen visited.
“That’s what Julie does. She makes every person a little better, a little more thoughtful,” says his wife.
The Carpenters weren’t the only people Tannen visited on her trips back to Maryland.
“She’s a person who works hard to make sure she stays connected to the people she loves,” Pam Carpenter says. “When she came home to see her mother, she also called her mother’s best friend, who is 93, her cousins, an old school friend of hers, an uncle who passed away just before turning 104. She brings people together.”
During one visit, Carpenter took Tannen to visit the latter’s childhood home in Silver Spring. When they reached the house, Tannen wanted to get out of the car and walk around. Carpenter suggested they alert the current owners about their presence.
“Julie knocked on the door and the woman who lived there invited us in,” Carpenter recalls. “She got out cookies and we talked. Imagine, a stranger just opens the door for us! Julie brings out something in everyone.”
As she got older, Ada Rhea Tannen found it increasingly challenging to take care of her daughter for more than a few days at a time. So Tannen began splitting her vacation time between her mother and Carpenter.
“At first, I wasn’t sure what it would be like having her here for days instead of just an hour at lunch,” Carpenter says. “But then it was OK. I told Julie, ‘Your mom thought it would be a great idea for you to come stay with me. She wants you to be with people who love you and we love you.’ Julie accepted that, and she would stay with me and visit her mom [in a nearby assisted living facility].”
When her mother passed away a decade ago, Tannen called Carpenter to tell her the sad news. “She said, ‘Pam, I don’t have any parents anymore. I’m nobody’s child.’ That just knocked the wind out of me,” Carpenter says.
That’s when Carpenter, her husband and their children began driving to Virginia to bring Tannen to their house for holidays, vacations and special occasions.
Tannen says her friendship with Carpenter is special since she has “known Pam for such a long time. I spend my vacations with her and I got out to eat with her and I see people with her, says Tannen. “She’s a nice person and she takes me swimming…” Tannen says she thinks of Carpenter as “family.”
“We will never take the place of Julie’s own family, but we are an extra family,” says Carpenter. “I know what I give to her. I’m someone she can call and visit. But it’s hard to put in words what she offers to me.
“I don’t know if I was her sister in a past life, but when Julie is here I feel a sense of calm, of life being right,” she says. “We can’t all be special to everyone in the world, but we can all make a profound difference in someone’s life.”
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