Today We Buried Lily Sinnamon (My BB Client)

Another Environmental Canary No Longer Sings

Today, August 12, 2026, I attended a very small Catholic Burial Mass ceremony for my friend and Building Biology client Lily Sinnamon, of Connecticut (USA). Despite being a resident here for many years, there was only a small turnout. Local social networks are not what they once were. Still, I wanted to launch a series of blog entries about Lily, my interactions with her and with agencies on her behalf extracting the lessons which can be learned.

In outline, Lily passed away in her own bed on August 5, 2026, apparently without stress. She had failing health since May 3, 2022 on the precise day that her home had an Eversource electric utility meter sneakily placed onto it. I was closely involved with her struggles for more than four years. She was nearly 86 years old.

Lily is representative of many of my Building Biology clients, those who are elderly living alone with environmental sensitivities, struggling to keep their health when even an outing for a routine medical appointment is apt to leave them recovering for days. People know they cannot live forever, but there are no safe end-of-life care homes for those with significant chemical and electrical sensitivity. Their struggle to keep themselves safe becomes constant as their strength to advocate for themselves erodes and an uncaring world eventually grinds them down, often with much suffering at the end. This is Lily’s arc, too.

Below, I have included the eulogy I wrote and delivered at the mass today to that small group of wellwishers. It deserves a larger audience and amplification. Obviously, by the end Lily had become far more than a transactional client of my Building Biology services, but that is how we started. She had no one else to speak for her, so I stepped into the gap. Everyone deserves to have their story told¹ so I shall do my best here in the next series of articles.

Lily’s casket was buried under the only tree in the cemetery proper. She really would have loved that connection to the natural world. Yet her body was pumped up with chemicals of the embalming process and that is one final injustice for a person whose life was made so harsh by chemical injury. Likely, this is part of the reason why her funeral was so lightly attended: many of her environmentally-challenged friends can no longer travel in public, to avoid exposure to their particular ‘kryptonite’².

Eulogy For Lily Sinnamon, August 12 2026

Greetings, Everyone. My name is Ken Gartner, a friend from Massachusetts. I would like to say a few words about our dear friend Lily Sinnamon.

I did not make Lily’s acquaintance until she was already ill from installation of an Eversource broadcasting electric meter back in 2022. I did not know Lily when she was thoroughly engaged in life, but instead only more recently when she was forced into reclusivity, because she had become so sensitized to electrical energies that travel in public became infeasible, primarily due to numerous wireless hot-spots, cellphones, cell towers and other modern gadgetry. I saw the Lily whose house was silent because she could not tolerate being within listening distance of even a radio, due to a pre-existing neural condition where certain common sounds would cause her harsh pain. I saw Lily when she was disconnected from most of her social networks and her only way to communicate was via her land-line phone which, itself, provided harsh and painful offense to her over-wrought and over-sensitized body. I only knew Lily when her life was a constant struggle.

Ostensibly, my relationship to Lily was as a consulting Building Biologist, with Lily as my client. At least, that is how it started in June of 2022 when I was asked to see what could be done after Eversource had put a broadcasting digital meter on the side of Lily’s house which caused her intense neurological pain from the very moment of its installation. I took measurements throughout her house, created a list of recommendations to improve her situation. Yet none of the recommendations were sufficient to ease her suffering, let alone allow her to heal. She was ill, elderly, and living by herself with a small support network so I was pulled into her orbit as an advocate for her well-being. Over the next four years, I ended up visiting Lily about one hundred times, offering pro bono (that is, unpaid) consultation and support, asking only that Lily pay for my gas, not my time.

What did I do for Lily? Well, I know what I did not do -- that is to find the miraculous solution needed to fix her situation, despite the enormous efforts undertaken. Lily often said that what I did was to save, or at least extend, her life, honoring her suffering as a genuine response to the situation, rather than a fictional over-reaction or attention-seeking ploy. Further, she said that I gave her hope that one day we might be victorious in our joint fight to force Eversource to remove their horrid metering technology and replace it with whatever she had before, which did not engender constant physical pain.

During my visits, I did handle the routine domestic chores needed, such as filling Lily’s small water pitchers from the huge, heavy five gallon glass carboys of spring water she had delivered. I ran laundry, which involved careful fiddling with the breaker panel, and travel to the basement which was beyond her capability. I performed small handyman chores -- much to my protest, but Lily had a way of convincing people to do exactly what she wanted -- such as putting heat shielding in the attic to reduce the drafts in the winter, repairing door locks, moving heavy window air conditioners in and out of place seasonally and so on. Lily’s house was frozen in the midst of reorganization after its 2021 repair from a tree falling on top of it, with Lily slowly recovering from her painful sojourn in an interim housing situation which immersed her in wireless devices exposure, sensitizing her body to all man-made electrical energy. She lived among opened banker boxes in every room, those packed up randomly by the insurance company, eternally trying to find her important paperwork. Entropy overpowered any attempt at proper housekeeping.

Of course, there were many attempts to improve Lily’s electrical situation such as putting up shielding materials between her and the meter, opening up her electrical panel and double checking, identifying specific repair work for an electrician, finding small ways for her to live her solitary life safely, removing physical vibrations from her appliances by placing them on cork standoffs and so on. Recently, I had set up an electrical switch for the fridge that allowed her to turn it off pneumatically, via a squeeze bulb and long air tube, so that she might approach it to access her food without pain. Each of these small improvements should have eased her life but more often than not, I was later asked to undo whatever I had done because they made her life incrementally worse. She was in a situation where any changes to her environment made her feel even more unwell. All paths indicated that she should just relocate away from her house, but resources were not available and she was not strong enough to move forward on this.

My most intense role was as Lily’s advocate. On her behalf, and at her insistence, we filed paperwork with the state Attorney General, with the state Utility Commission, and with the state Consumer Protection agencies. I provided evidence that the meter was the direct cause of her health situation and she wanted Eversource to replace it. To no avail, because each agency concluded that Eversource owned that equipment and they had no legal authority to force their hand.

My interaction with Eversource, the behomoth utility agency that spans several New England states, was intense. I helped Lily write letters, with numerous pieces of supporting evidence, addressed to the Board of Trustees, to the President and others in a position to perform the simple task of restoring Lily’s prior, non-injurious meter. A very simple ask, at very low cost and effort to Eversource, but they refused on numerous occasions to budge even one inch. To this day, in Connecticut no one is able to obtain that relief from their ‘smart meter’, though Eversource in Massachusetts is now offering perfectly safe meters to clients willing to pay a small monthly fee. Had Eversource done what it was asked to do in 2022, 2023 or 2024, then Lily would likely have recovered her health substantially. Although it will not appear on her death certificate, Lily Sinnamon would say that she was killed³ by the technology employed in Eversource’s electronic metering and the callous disregard for her health expressed by Eversource Management.

But Lily should be remembered more than for her illness, though the unspeakable indignities and continuous pain she experienced are never far from my mind. Lily Sinnamon was born on November 5, 1940. I know this because I was asked to pick up her medication at the local pharmacy on numerous occasions. Lily’s family hails from Philadelphia, where some harrowing events were part of her backstory, including the pointless assassination of her shopkeeper father in the early 1970s. I learned of these incidents because Lily asked me to get a genealogy subscription to see if I could locate any living family she might have and give her some information about her ancestral lineage, which stems mostly from County Tyrone in Ireland. We shared in that adventure together.

I visited with Lily on the Sunday before her passing. Her spiritual intuition has guided me to open certain electric outlets in her home for inspection and I did repair loose electrical screws. Lily looked terrible, enfeebled with purple legs, on nearly constant oxygen and now starting to forget what she was talking about in mid-sentence, which was new for her. The arc of her inexorable health decline had been so long in duration that I had no sense that she was to soon pass. She mentioned that she had lost two pounds since her brother Harry passed some weeks ago, and that was far too much for her to lose as her appetite to eat had long since abandoned her. She greeted me with her typical to-do list, having a half-dozen ‘first priority’ items. She was ‘feisty’ and planning our next visit, plaintively asking me once again to explain why I could not come more often. Situation normal.

Lily’s will to survive never left her in the four years I knew her. It was by main force of will, plus the nightly assistance she had from the spiritual realm, that Lily survived as long as she had. She remained so confident that she would overcome, that I would somehow pull off some miracle of fixing the electrical situation at her house or that injurious meter be removed. When Lily fought for her own accommodation rights, she fought for the many others like herself.

Lily should never have lived alone in her condition at this stage in her life, but there are no care homes for people having her environmental over-reactivity and moving her into one against her will was unthinkable. She passed away in her bed, in her house, without evidence of distress at the end. By all measures she ‘did it her way’⁴ and with her own panache. I take many lessons from my experience with Lily and have often mused whether Fate had placed me into Lily’s life to help her OR whether she had been placed into mine to help me. In the end, we both benefited. These remembrances of our shared journey will stick with me, such lessons to be applied to benefit others who find themselves in similar situations, and this is how I will honor Lily for the rest of my own life.

1. I have been very mindful lately of the Orson Scott Card trilogy whose main character was the very long lived ‘Speaker for the Dead’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead), the main character from Ender’s Game. In that book, the Speaker researched his subject thoroughly and then spoke both the good and the bad, honestly, in a closure ceremony.

2. I am using 'krytonite’ symbolically to indicate the particular collection of environmental factors which do lay a person low. It will vary by individual, based on their biology and life experience. Kryptonite was only harmful for Superman. In a loosely analogous way, some of the environmental exposures — for example certain tonal sounds — were excruciatingly painful to Lily. Formaldehyde is bad for everyone, I know, but those who acutely affected by it in tiny quantities seem more akin to how Superman reacts to kryptonite. I mean no offense to anyone by somehow trivializing their life experience. I am taking literary license here with the term.

3. This was Lily’s contention — that the meter was killing her. Her death vindicates that prediction, based on all the evidence I am privy to.

4. “I Did It My Way” was a very popular tune in American culture, especially in the early 1970s. It was Frank Sinatra’s signature song. I use the title line to express the fervent wish many end-of-life people have: to die at home, in their own bed, instead of a nursing home or hospital room.