In the last issue of Westview I wrote about my former tenant, Edwina Fontaine, and the choices I had to make about her life and death after she suffered from pneumonia at the DeWitt Rehabilitation Center.
Edwina survived the pneumonia – barely. She left Lenox Hill Hospital on November 7th and I was able to get her into a new hospice run by Calvary Hospital, at 72nd and York, atop the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home. Calvary is an unbelievably wonderful place, and after my exposure to the three-patients-in-a-room horrors of Dewitt, I was ecstatic. Edwina had her own room. We were able to decorate it with flowers and personal items. She had a large window with lots of light, no tubes or IVs, and nurses who patiently fed her on demand and who took their time. It was a pleasant place for friends to visit – and lots came, alerted by the Westview article.
Unfortunately, she declined. It was slow. It was peaceful, and on November 24 she died in her sleep, clutching a stuffed cat I had brought from her apartment.
Edwina was old and she suffered from dementia. But she didn’t have to die the way she did, from disease caused by neglect and over-sedation in the Dewitt Nursing Home.
I intend to pursue what I believe is criminally negligent behavior at DeWitt and have already contacted Attorney General Schneiderman. And next month I will prepare an obituary about Edwina Fontaine’s life – a world-famous ballerina by the age of 14, who chose to live in the West Village and teach hundreds of little girls and young women how to dance like Balanchine. I invite those who knew her, or studied with her, to contribute.
