House of Horrors
On November 29, 2000, Officer Alexander Petigna of the Kansas Highway Patrol knocked on the weather-beaten door of a house just off Leavenworth Road in Kansas City, Kansas. Beside him stood a shivering 77-year-old man.
A 911 caller had reported that the man was wandering beside I-635. Petigna was trying to help James Washington (not his real name) find his home. Washington, who suffers from dementia, had already led the officer to a boarded-up church that still bore his name as pastor on the sign.
Now, with the help of a city police officer, Petigna had found a second crumbling sanctuary — an adult foster-care home where Washington’s daughter had placed him three days earlier after he’d slept overnight in a neighbor’s front yard.
When the door opened, a middle-aged woman peered out, bundled up in a ski bib and wearing panty hose for a stocking cap. She was not the owner of the house, she told Petigna, but a resident. She was watching the other people in the house while Christine Allen, the owner, was at work. Petigna looked past the woman into the dim living room.
“Things began not to add up,” Petigna says. He asked Janice (not her real name) if he could look at Washington’s room. “Sure, come on in,” Janice said and opened the door wider.
The stench of urine almost overwhelmed him. “It took everything I had not to throw up,” Petigna says. The house was bitterly cold, and two other female residents — also dressed in heavy clothes and stocking caps — wandered about.
Dirt, cockroaches and dog food littered the kitchen floor. The ceiling above the oven was heavily stained with burned-on soot. The oven was cranked to 500 degrees, throwing some heat through its open door, while a tin filled with dog food, noodles and vegetables roasted on the upper rack.
“It had been cooking for several hours,” says Petigna. Cabinets stood open; dirty dishes sat in piles in the sink and on the countertop. A chicken soaked in a pot of water on the stove. “The water had that day-or-two-old look, like greasy dishwater,” says Petigna. He opened two mildewed refrigerators and a deep freeze and found them packed tight with rotten food.
When Petigna accidentally bumped the phone on the kitchen wall, knocking it loose, twenty or so cockroaches swarmed out and scurried in all directions. Petigna turned to the Kansas City, Kansas, officer and told him, “We’re not leaving until SRS gets here.”
Petigna wanted state social workers to come get the residents out of the squalid house immediately. In fact, Kansas social workers had been there many times before. From 1989 to 1998, Social Rehabilitation Services had inspected and licensed the home under the name Modern Concepts to care for mentally ill adults. However, for the past two years, Christine Allen had operated Modern Concepts with no state oversight.
When Petigna’s Kansas Highway Patrol dispatcher phoned SRS that afternoon, the call ended abruptly: No one from the agency would come out, Petigna says. So the trooper dialed the number and demanded to speak to a supervisor. “I told them, ‘I’m sitting on this house, and I’m not leaving until you send someone out here,'” Petigna says.
He glanced out the kitchen window. Three dogs attached to heavy chains shivered, with no water or food. “The dogs appeared sick with mange and malnutrition,” Petigna wrote in his report. But a tour inside further confirmed that the dogs were not the only ones neglected.
Water-soaked carpet in Washington’s bedroom in the basement squished beneath Petigna’s boots. “Later, we found out we were walking on raw sewage from a broken sewer line,” he says. Two other basement rooms were so cluttered that he couldn’t step into them. “Once upstairs, I went directly to the bathroom,” Petigna wrote in his report. “The odors were terrible. There I found a dirty, backed-up sink. The sink had urine on it. Opening the cabinet door you would see the drain wasn’t connected. It drained onto pieces of crumpled-up newspaper. The floor was weak and worn. I worried about falling through.”
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In one of the upstairs bedrooms, Petigna found Emma (not her real name), a 78-year-old woman, sitting alone cutting small pieces of fabric for a quilt by the light of her lamp — a 1-by-4 board with a socket and bare bulb — lying beside her on the bed. A tiny space heater hummed in a corner. She’d eaten two hot dog buns for breakfast and nothing for lunch, Emma told Petigna. She too was heavily clothed. On her feet, she wore two plastic bags. Like Janice and the other residents (except Washington), she was schizophrenic.
As Petigna investigated, two staffers from SRS’s Adult Protective Services showed up, along with two social workers from Wyandot Mental Health Center and an inspector from codes enforcement of the unified city-county government. Police officers roamed the house, videotaping and photographing the rotting food, code violations and overall filth.
Allen’s husband, James, drove up, and soon Allen herself arrived. As he directed the photographer, Petigna wrote in his report, “Allen would get in the way, trying to make excuses for what we saw. When we entered the kitchen, she was ahead of us sweeping up the roaches. She beat us to the oven, throwing the heated tray of dog food on the back porch, where I later found it after the filming.”
The codes enforcement officer pasted a neon-pink sign to the window by the front door: UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION. All of the residents were removed — three in the care of Wyandot Mental Health and University of Kansas Medical Center, one in her mother’s care, and Washington in the hands of SRS.
“There was no way in good conscience I was leaving that house without those people,” says Petigna.
But the residents of Modern Concepts had been left behind many times before.
SRS files from 1985 to 1996 reflect repeated noncompliant behavior. Ms. Allen has been given provisional licenses for a number of years…. Ms. Allen has been noncompliant for over ten years. — Letter from Cristine Deibler to Lori Nuebel, Commission of Mental Health, October 1998
DO NOT WASH SHEETS, BEDSPREADS, COMFORTERS OR LARGE ITEMS IN BATHTUB. STAFF WILL WASH THEM FOR YOU BY SCHEDULE. WASH PANTIES, BRAS IN LAVATORY SINK IF YOU DESIRE. — Sign posted in the bathroom shared by four residents and three staff members at Modern Concepts.
When Petigna shut down Modern Concepts in November, it was an unlicensed, unsupervised group home whose owner had for ten years thwarted the government’s attempts to improve or close it. Group homes are required by state law to be licensed and inspected. Yet according to a decade’s worth of state records, the place was a mess virtually every time SRS visited — and on the rare occasions that residents were allowed out for treatment or evaluation, community mental health agencies often refused to bring residents back.
Funded for a time under the state’s alternate care program, Modern Concepts was responsible for residents’ safety and nutrition, and Allen was expected to assist them with making and keeping appointments for medical care. She was also expected to make sure medications were properly taken.
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“Provisional” licenses granted to Allen by SRS after 1996 were intended to allow her to fix the problems seen time and again on inspectors’ visits. In 1998, a new SRS department — Quality Enhancement — took over the licensing of group homes. A no-nonsense inspector, Cristine Deibler ultimately ended the practice of extending provisional licenses to Modern Concepts, shutting off a source of state income for Allen, who received a $200 monthly alternate care payment per resident from SRS while licensed.
Even that hardship did not close down Modern Concepts. Because of a bureaucratic mix-up, benefit payments administered by Social Security were never suspended after the license was canceled. Those federal funds kept the house open until the state trooper happened upon it in November.
Now Allen wants to reopen the house. When codes inspectors closed Modern Concepts, they shut down her source of income. She had received private payments from the mother of one of the residents, plus $512 per month each from Social Security for three others.
Residential care facilities such as Modern Concepts developed as an option for people released from state mental hospitals and those incapable of taking care of themselves, but they’ve become less common in recent years. Kansas still has roughly 35 group homes for the mentally ill, but Modern Concepts was the last in Kansas City, Kansas.
Even as Modern Concepts remained unfit for human habitation in mid-December, an expired Kansas license from 1996 hung on the wall in Allen’s basement office at the house. “I just kind of leave it up there,” she says.
Her new brochure nonetheless states that Modern Concepts is licensed by the State of Kansas. The home coordinates services with mental health centers, according to the leaflet, and offers in-center vocational training and educational opportunities — all while providing 24-hour staffing and delicious home-cooked meals in air-conditioned comfort.
Allen claims that she always treated her residents with “tender, loving care” and that Petigna, SRS and Wyandot Mental Health Center are exploiting her former residents. Allen presents herself as an angel of mercy to people she says nobody else wanted to be bothered with. One resident removed in November still calls daily begging to come home, Allen says.
“That’s what I don’t understand, why they’re being cruel like this and trying to keep them from coming back,” says Allen. “I just think it’s time for them to let them come home.”
Five days before Christmas, Allen gave the Pitch a tour of Modern Concepts after it had undergone two weeks of repairs. She hoped to be up to code soon. In the room where Washington stayed, a mildew stain 2 feet high remained on the wall from the sewage break. From a 3-foot-long hole in the ceiling, plastic bags duct-taped to exposed pipes dangled into the room.
Down the hall, in the “activity room” beneath the kitchen, streaks of brown stained one wall. Upstairs, in the room that Janice and another resident, Brenda (not her real name) shared, Allen had placed a small stuffed animal on top of each neatly made bed.
“That’s for if they come back home,” she said with a sigh.
But the tidiest bedroom was that of Emma, who spent most of her time alone. “See, she wrapped everything in plastic,” said Allen. “That’s how she was. She wore plastic bags on her feet and head all the time, even in summer.” On the floor in Emma’s closet were several instant-coffee jars filled with water. A stack of pie tins wrapped in plastic sat on a table by the wall. Allen pulled the sheets back from the bed to reveal a yellow plastic cover on the mattress. “We treated her like a queen,” Allen said. “We just respected her so much.
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“She would urinate into buckets; she did do that,” Allen admitted. “And she brought her own utensils to the table; she wouldn’t use what everybody else used. She saved her water in coffee jars so she wouldn’t run out of water.”
Blaming the city sewer system, Allen acknowledges she was unable to keep the house clean and the plumbing functioning. Two weeks after her residents were removed, Allen received money from a cost-share program of the Wyandotte County Conservation District, and a new septic tank was installed.
The day of “this tragedy,” as Allen refers to the closing, the furnace had been broken for only two days, after it caught fire one morning, she explains.
Relatives of some residents, however, say the house often was cold.
Life wasn’t easy for her or her residents, says Allen. She often would stay at Modern Concepts, she insists, where she and the residents had to regularly plunge out the toilet and sinks. It was impossible to get rid of the cockroaches. She couldn’t do laundry at the house, so she got clothes from thrift stores for the residents and then threw them away when they became soiled. If and when residents bathed, bathwater was heated on the stove.
After SRS discontinued the monthly alternate care funds, Allen had barely enough money to scrape by. But running an adult foster-care home had long been her dream, she says, and she persevered.
Allen herself had been bumped around the foster-care system as a child. At 10 years old, she was removed from the custody of her pipe-smoking aunt, a mean and sickly woman who spat tobacco juice on Allen and blew smoke in her face. Allen never knew her mother.
“I was a throwaway child,” she says. Allen married, but James, her husband, abandoned her for a time, and she raised four children alone. Still, Allen put herself through college, earning an associate’s degree in nursing home administration.
But she’s had problems from the beginning as administrator of Modern Concepts. The Kansas City Star published a column in 1988 about Allen and her troubles with codes enforcement but portrayed her as a struggling do-gooder neglected by the powers that be.
“Where is the City Council in all of this? The Kansas Legislature?” the writer asked about Allen’s lack of funding. “We need many more like [Allen] if our cities are to remain livable, humane places.”
After Modern Concepts was shut down in November, Allen once again took her story to the media. She published a plea for donations to reopen Modern Concepts in Talk of the Town, a local publication, and set up a bank account for the money. But as of mid-January, Allen had received only $20.
Allen even called the Kansas City Kansan and granted a telephone interview to a reporter who wrote a glowing front-page feature about her and Modern Concepts without visiting the house. According to Allen, she’s been misunderstood by the officials who removed her residents.
“They told the mother of one of my residents not to bring her back here because I feed my people dog food,” says Allen. “I don’t feed my residents dog food, and I was shocked when they said that.” The dog food found in the oven wasn’t cooking, she says. It was in the unheated side of the double oven for safekeeping. “We had bugs, and I wanted to make sure that nothing could get in it.”
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“They took my dogs away too, you know,” she adds. “I think that is a disgrace, and it hurts me deeply. To this day, I do not know why they did that.”
Outside, as the wind whips the temperature down to single digits, a new dog is chained in the backyard, huddling on sheets of paper and a sheer curtain spread over frozen mud. The three dogs taken during the shutdown were never claimed and eventually were euthanized, according to Wyandotte County Animal Control.
“I have gone without and done without,” says Allen. “We’ve all been indigent in the middle of the city doing the best we can with what we have. We were happy to be who we were, and these residents and I all worked together. I’d tell them, ‘I’m trying to get the money for the septic tank,’ and they’d say, ‘How long is it going to take, Miss Allen?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s real, real soon,’ and they would smile.”
[Brenda] is having one of her days again, cussing, hitting, throwing and breaking out windows…. She urinated on herself, the floor and her rug in her bedroom. She actually drank her own urine. She was pulling off her clothes, including panties, pants, bra and shirt. I sat her in a corner to herself, but it didn’t do any good. — Modern Concepts resident incident report, August 15, 1995.
Our indigent residents were treated with dignity and respect. The domestic tranquility was evident in their surroundings, minus the blight and confusion caused by the lack of revenue. — Excerpt from “Story of Pain,” an essay Christine Allen wrote after officials shut down Modern Concepts.
When SRS’ Quality Enhancement department was created in 1998, Cristine Deibler, quality enhancement coordinator, journeyed out to Modern Concepts to introduce herself.
“I was immediately concerned with the condition of the home,” recalls Deibler. “I had concerns about the cleanliness of the home, the debris, the physical structure, the bugs and whether the residents were receiving proper care.”
Modern Concepts had received provisional licenses for several years, even though previous annual SRS licensing visits found conditions similar to what Deibler observed. Deibler’s activity log, starting from the summer of 1998, is part of the court records of Allen’s appeal of her license cancellation.
On one unannounced visit, Deibler made the following notes: “House was very dirty. In the kitchen, cantaloupe rinds on countertop with fifteen to twenty roaches on them. Dirty dishes piled up in the sink and the countertop, food debris on floor. Resident was preparing peas; peas from pod looked green, off-white and black.”
A couple of weeks later, when a resident became increasingly violent, Deibler suggested that Allen take her to KU Medical Center for evaluation. Allen was hesitant, according to Deibler’s case activity log: “Christine stated that she had taken people to KU before, but then they never came back.”
During one of her visits, Deibler suggested that another of Allen’s residents be referred to Adult Protective Services, but Allen “was nervous about a referral to adult services, as people had made allegations about her in the past and removed people from her,” according to the case log.
Allen’s brochure claims that she works with local mental health agencies to ensure proper care for her residents, but Allen admits she hasn’t brought residents to such agencies as Wyandot Mental Health Center for years. “I’ve had lots of people that I’ve sent them, and they disappeared,” says Allen. “They would go out for a checkup and never come back.” One time when Allen took Janice and another resident to Rainbow Mental Health, she says, “they said they were keeping them. They didn’t ask me anything, and they wouldn’t let me explain.”
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According to Allen, SRS told her that the agency moved Janice out because she’d said one of Allen’s sons had “jumped on her.”
“I asked Janice about that, and she said, ‘No, I didn’t tell anyone that,'” says Allen. One of Allen’s sons, Shawn, is in Lansing State Prison for forgery and cocaine possession. Her other son, James, is also locked up on drug-related convictions. His record includes an aggravated-robbery conviction.
Janice stayed elsewhere for a year, while Johnson County Mental Health Center managed her care. But Allen got Janice back to the house and had her sign a letter to the mental health center: “I chose to return to this facility, and I am well-pleased at the plan of care for me…. Modern Concepts will provide my future clothing needs and other incidental needs…. Quite a few of my items are still here with me that I need for my care, that I had left here a year ago this month.”
Leslie Young, director of community support systems at Wyandot Mental Health Center, had worked with another one of Allen’s residents in 1987 while at a different mental health agency — and had hotlined her concerns about that resident’s care to SRS. When Young took the position at Wyandot Mental Health in 1990, she advised her staff not to refer clients to Modern Concepts at all.
“I didn’t feel there was a good working relationship between the operator of the home and our staff,” says Young. Shortly after coming to Wyandot, Young attempted to work with a resident who had been referred by her family to Modern Concepts. The resident functioned better cognitively than the other residents with whom she lived at Modern Concepts, Young says.
“She clearly wanted out of the home,” says Young. “We felt that when she tried to make plans to move out, she would get quite fearful of the boarding-home operator.” Eventually, Young and the resident set a move-out date, and the resident never returned to Modern Concepts. “She left all her things there,” recalls Young, “because she was afraid to tell Ms. Allen.
“We have heard consistent information from people who lived there, and it’s that information that led us to the non-referral policy,” Young continues.
Even though Young says that her staff had expressed concern about Modern Concepts to Adult Protective Services over the years, SRS continued to license Allen’s home. Rosalee Sachs, the current progam manager for Adult Protective Services, says she didn’t have responsibility for the licensing program when Adult Protective Services handled licensing of residential care facilities. The person who handled it has since retired, says Sachs, who declined to answer specific questions about Modern Concepts.
“I didn’t have responsibility for the program and can’t address those issues,” says Sachs.
According to Allen, no one from SRS came to her home (other than for an annual licensing visit) until 1998, when Deibler informed her that Modern Concepts’ license would not be renewed unless Allen met licensing standards.
“I used to lay awake at night worrying about what went on in that house when I wasn’t there,” says Deibler. When Allen filed her annual license application in 1998, Deibler gave her from July to October to correct the numerous deficiencies.
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“I found a pattern there, and I did not feel confident giving another provisional license,” says Deibler. “Any time a facility is given a provisional over and over again for the same things, with the same results, that’s a red flag.”
After Modern Concepts’ license was not renewed in 1999, an SRS representative hand-delivered letters to the residents advising them that the home was no longer licensed, and SRS offered to help them relocate. SRS was required by law to alert Social Security of the license action so the agency could halt or decrease its benefit payments to Allen. Deibler says she contacted Social Security and exchanged e-mail correspondence with her supervisor confirming the notification.
However, John Garlinger, communications director for the Social Security Administration’s Region 7, says the agency has no evidence that anyone there received notice of a license action for Modern Concepts.
“If we weren’t notified, we would have no reason to stop the payments,” says Garlinger. Now that Social Security has removed Allen as a payee (after Modern Concepts was declared uninhabitable), she is ineligible to become a payee again.
“We didn’t renew the license, and we took away the funds for alternate care,” says Lori Nuebel, quality enhancement supervisor. “We hope that when we do that, they will not have enough money to operate. We sent letters to the residents and called Social Security. They had the option of withholding [benefit] checks but didn’t. If everybody does what they should do, it reduces the chances of this type of situation.”
In the case of Modern Concepts, the system failed on many levels. The Unified Government’s department of code enforcement continued to issue a city business license to Modern Concepts, even though the home had a history of deficiencies. Staff at Wyandot Mental Health had informed Adult Protective Services over the years of Allen’s questionable care, but SRS continued to issue provisional state licenses to Allen anyway. Even after the license was revoked, Social Security continued mailing checks to the house.
“The system kind of failed folks previous to that, but I think that we’re looking at a system even bigger than SRS here, if you look at all the failures,” says Nuebel. “Where was family? And there was the failure of Ms. Allen to keep up her group home in a manner that should have been done, along with SRS locally and at the central office, along with the doctor that probably saw them.
“I think a lot of it goes back to how persons with mental illness are viewed and to the stigma that allows people with mental illness to be treated differently,” Nuebel says.
Consumers appeared drugged and unresponsive to my presence. No daily plan or activity for them to do. — Deibler’s case activity log, August 1998.
[Brenda] acting out, Shawn was trying to lock her up in a room last night. Paged Christine. I confronted her about the situation. — Deibler’s case activity log, September 1998.
Few of the relatives of the residents removed from Modern Concepts would agree to an interview. However, Wanda Hauber, whose 96-year-old aunt was a resident of Allen’s in 1987, says she signed over her aunt’s dilapidated house to Allen to pay for one year of care for the woman, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Allen asked for an additional $600 per month, for which she would accept only cash, Hauber says.
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After Allen had fulfilled the one-year obligation, says Hauber, “she wanted my aunt out of there. I took my aunt out because I didn’t like the way they treated her. With the medications she was on, she was shaking like a leaf. She begged me to take her out.”
Hauber says she bought an electric blanket for her aunt but that when she visited Modern Concepts, “Mrs. Allen said she took it home so it wouldn’t get messed up.” According to Hauber, on the day she removed her aunt from the home, Allen handed her some garbage bags full of her aunt’s belongings.
“I was buying powder and lotions for her, and I never got them back,” Hauber says. “I never got her winter coat back or the electric blanket or the new suitcases I bought her.
“[Allen] did come to my aunt’s funeral, but she wouldn’t speak to me,” Hauber continues.
Allen still remembers Hauber’s aunt. “She was precious; she was so sweet,” Allen recalls. “I couldn’t keep her clean, though. She would go in the corner and take her diapers off.” If she owes Hauber money for an electric blanket, Allen says, she’d be happy to give it to her now.
“She’s had years to address that if she wanted,” Allen says. “What I perceive as one thing, someone else perceives as another.”
One other relative who spoke to the Pitch about the house was Houston Clark, Emma’s cousin. He says Emma had been moved to a nursing home and suffered a stroke a couple of weeks later. Emma had spent the past thirteen years at Modern Concepts, mostly alone in her room, eating with her own carefully wrapped utensils and covering pie tins, her mattress and her feet and head with plastic bags.
Clark doesn’t know whether Emma was happy at the house. “She seemed to accept it,” he says. Still, he has grave concerns about the care she received. “She’d been given medication by a doctor for high blood pressure, but Ms. Allen couldn’t get her to take it,” says Clark. “She couldn’t get her to change clothes, and Emma wore the same clothes year-round.”
But even more disturbing questions about Emma’s care remain. “The doctor told her sister that Emma has a venereal disease,” says Clark. “He said she’s got syphilis. I’d be interested in knowing how she got that.” According to Allen, Emma left the house only three times in thirteen years. Although an examination could reveal how long ago Emma contracted syphilis, her family did not wish to probe the frail woman’s body for answers as she lay in a nursing home.
Dr. John Gamble Jr., to whom Allen says she took her residents at least once a year, says the only time he saw Emma was in February 1999. At that time, he’d prescribed Cardizem for her high blood pressure, but the prescription had never been refilled.
Except for one resident whose mother took her to another doctor, and Emma, Gamble says he saw the others living at Modern Concepts regularly but hasn’t seen any of them since the summer of 1999. Still, he continued to refill their prescriptions. One resident was on Haldol for schizophrenia, and another took the anti-psychotic medications Melleril and Zyprexa. Emma, who was schizophrenic, received no medication for her mental illness.
Like Allen, Gamble had fallen into disfavor with state officials in the past. In 1988, the Kansas Board of Healing Arts disciplined him for “matters pertaining to his prescribing of controlled substances.” Gamble was ordered to attend an education program about controlled substances and for 22 months was not allowed to purchase, possess, prescribe, dispense or administer narcotics.
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Allen insists her residents were on the same medication for a long time, so they didn’t have to change it. “Whenever they needed medicine, I called the doctor, and he just refilled it,” she says.
Allen claims that Emma refused to take her medication. Still, Allen could have called Wyandot Mental Health Center for assistance in getting Emma to take her medication but didn’t. Instead, the elderly woman remained untreated for high blood pressure and schizophrenia.
On a morning in mid-January, Modern Concepts had running water once again, the kitchen and bathroom floors were repaired and new curtains hung in the kitchen window.
Although the house wasn’t exactly clean, it was good enough to pass a recent inspection by codes enforcement of the Unified Government. Allen says she’s gotten her city license renewed and is back in business.
It’s doubtful that the residents removed in November will ever return to Modern Concepts. Allen may reapply for a state license at some point, she says, but for now she’ll try to take care of residents without assistance from SRS. Allen plans to make the house “really beautiful” and says that in the future she will take only people whose care is paid for by private means.
But Allen still faces an investigation stemming from the closing of Modern Concepts in November. Her case was forwarded to the Kansas attorney general’s office a few weeks ago and is being investigated, according to Tiffany Ball, public information officer for the attorney general. Ball could not disclose any information about the ongoing investigation.
Allen insists that officials overreacted in removing her residents.
“If they’d tried to help me and not jumped to conclusions, I wouldn’t be in this situation,” says Allen. “If my residents had been out on the streets, a lot of things would have happened to them.”
“I’m not a quitter. I did not give up, and I won’t give up now because I believe in the principle of adult foster homes. Some people, if they have a home environment, don’t feel the need to use places like Wyandot Mental Health. I worked my plan of care according to my residents,” she says.
Even if Modern Concepts had met state standards, Allen might have found it difficult to continue with her dream. Most funds allocated to the alternate care program for the mentally ill are used for rent, furniture and other necessities to allow independent living rather than going to group homes.
Although she faces a criminal investigation by the state attorney general’s office, Allen insists she has done nothing wrong. All of her residents, she says, “were perfectly at home here.”
On the road to the nursing home, you told me you were ready to go home. “Where’s home?” I asked. “Through the golden gate — you know, toward the sun,” you said. I knew then that you would soon be leaving. — Eulogy written for Emma by Ally Mabry, social worker at Wyandot Mental Health Center.
Two weeks ago, Emma — the resident whom Trooper Petigna found alone, quilting in her room at Modern Concepts — died in the middle of the night at a nursing home. She had been recovering from her recent stroke.
The morning of Emma’s funeral, thirty or so family members and friends gathered to say goodbye. A few people from Wyandot Mental Health came, and a couple more from SRS. Christine Allen sat a few rows back.
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As a woman sang “Amazing Grace” a cappella, a few mourners hummed along, with an occasional “hallelujah” and “amen.” A portrait of Emma from years ago — stylish, poised and smiling — was on display.
When mourners filed by the casket to pay their last respects, Allen pulled out a Polaroid camera and snapped a final shot of Emma, then slammed the camera shut and walked away.
Later, at the graveside service, the family sat in a row of folding chairs, and the others — minus Allen — huddled behind. The minister stood beside a coffin covered in pink carnations and offered a few final words.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
“Emma was a beautiful person,” recalls Clark, her cousin. “But she had some problems later in life.”
With medication and treatment from a community mental health center, Emma might have lived independently in recent years and she could have received treatment for the health conditions that led to her stroke. Yet much of her life ended more than a decade earlier, when she moved into a house where she feared leaving her room, feared using the toilet, feared eating, feared drinking.
