Rich Woman Forced To Live Like Peasant
Now that Mrs. Astor has passed on to Rich People's Heaven, the Post needs another subject on which it can exercise its comical ire. Fortunately, they've found one in the form of socialite Emily "Pemmy" du Pont Frick, whose "ailing, elderly mother... is being warehoused in a dreary nursing home in Pennsylvania where most residents are destitute... despite having a megarich daughter whose home sold for nearly $60 million last year." Can you feel the outrage? Not only is Frick unrepentant about making her mom a ward of the state, she has the nerve to kick one of the paper's fine investigative journalists off her porch for asking importunate questions. And what of her poor mother?
Afflicted with Alzheimer's disease and blindness, Frick's mom, Troth, resides in a small, single-bed room lit by florescent bulbs in the Main Line Nursing Home and Rehabilitation Center in Malvern, Pa., the relative claimed. The painfully thin, white-haired woman is surrounded by a few personal belongings, including a grandfather clock and some photos of her dead husband, the relative said. "She's on a little, uncomfortable mattress, the window in her room is half falling off," the relative said. [...] The relative said, "Main Line is rundown. You can't imagine a facility so awful, horrible. It's beyond description. There's people shouting, people mad as hatters, spit flying out of their mouths. It's horribly depressing." Troth has suffered in the nursing home, according to the relative, who said, "She shouts, she yells, she's uncomfortable." "The smell is atrocious, overwhelming," the relative said. "She's not being showered regularly. The caretakers look apathetic . . . [Troth's] skin looks translucent, like she hasn't seen the light of day in years."
While this is both tragic and terrible, it should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time in a facility that cares for those who suffer from dementia: This is the way most of America dies. Good for the Post for getting indignant over the fact that a wealthy person may have to suffer like a commoner in one of our underfunded poor people health care centers, rather than expressing that anger over the fact that these conditions are the rule rather than the exceptions. If our millionaires have to expire in the same squalor as the rest of us then, really, aren't we making a mockery of what America's all about?
