Kitty Dukakis, wife of the former governor and presidential candidate, die of 88 star-news.press/wp

Brookline, mass. – Kitty Dukakis, his wife of the former Governor Massachusetts and Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who openly spoke about her fighting with depression and addiction, was killed. She was 88 years old.

Dukakis died on Friday night surrounded by her family, her son, John Dukakis, he said on Saturday. She struggled that the world would make better “, sharing her vulnerabilities to help others face his own,” her family said in the statement.

“There was love, a feist and fun and she had sharp sensitivity to people from all walks of life,” the family said. “She and our father Michael Dukakis shared an enviable partnership for more than 60 years and deeply loved.”

During the president of her husband in 1988. won high grades as a political campaign. She called her a key influence in his decision to seek presidency.

She even understood the 198ry presidential hearing. Years, when her husband asked, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis would be raped and killed, would you bow to the irrevocable death penalty?” Dukakis said that he would not, and his unmotional response was broadly criticized.

Earlier in the campaign, in 1987. Dukakis discovered that the 26-year-old addiction of amphetamines had overcome five years earlier after receiving treatment. She said she started taking pills for a 19-year-old diet.

Her husband made a big question effort and became pointed out in an effort to educate the young men against the danger of drug and alcohol abuse.

But a few months after Michael Dukakis lost the election for George Hw Bush, Kitty Dukakis entered the 60-day treatment for alcoholism. A few months later she suffered relapse and was hospitalized after drinking alcohol.

In its autobiography from 1990. “Now you know,” she blamed her mother for a big of her alcohol and drug addiction and long history of low self-esteem. 2006. He wrote another book, “shock”, who credits an electroconvulsive therapy, which she began in 2001. years to mitigate the depression she suffered for years. Treatment, she wrote, “she opened a new reality for me for me.”

Current Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey called Dukakis “forces for good in public life and behind the scenes,” the leader in an effort to ensure that Holocaust never forgets and advocate for children, women and refugees.

“She talked about her fighting with the use of substance and mental health disorders, which serves us as an inspiration for breaking stigma and seek help in the statement.

Dukakis used personal pain to help others, Massachusetts General Andrea Joy Campbell in the Social Media statement on Saturday.

“Her legacy will live in policies that helped in the form and people he inspired to speak his own truths,” Campbell said.

Dukakis and her future husband met as they attended high school in Brooklin, Massachusetts, the suburbs of Boston. He was boring and thrifty; She was dramatic and fantasy. He is Greek Orthodox; She was Jewish.

Dukakis, who divorced and had a three-year-old son, married to Dukakis in 1963. years, and they had two children, Andrea and Kara.

Dukakis, whose late father, Harry Ellis Dickson, was an extraordinary conductor of the Symphony Orchestra Boston, earned the diplomas of modern dance and broadcasting.

After the presidential elections, 1989. year, Bush appointed to be a member of the United States of the Holocaust Memorial Council.

She previously served the President’s Holocaust Commission in 1979. years, and in the Committee of the Refugee Policy Director. She was also a member of the working group on Cambodian children.

At the end of the 1990s, Dukakis and her husband shared his time between Massachusetts and California, where the social worker was and was a professor for part of the year at the University of California, Los Angeles.

____ Former writer with the Associated Lisa Flam contributed to this report.