BY PENNY ARCADE, DANA DAVISON and MIKKI MAHER | A suffocating
and corrupt bureaucracy has grown up around social services for the
elderly. Guardians, social workers, financial managers and other
caregivers too often show a cavalier disregard for the welfare of their
charges. And don’t imagine for a moment that it is only lonely,
friendless, isolated denizens that become victims of abuse. If you are a
senior caught in this bureaucratic quagmire, even your best friends
can’t help you.
Consider the case of Kasoundra Kasoundra. This very
original New York Underground personality, now pushing 80, has been an
avant-garde artist for more than half a century. When she arrived in
Manhattan as a Midwestern college dropout in the early ’60s, she boldly
knocked on the doors of celebrities such as Hermione Gingold and Bob
Dylan simply to find out what made them tick.
Modeling at the Art Students League to earn her living,
Kasoundra inserted herself into the urban art underground, making
friends with its creative geniuses while she perfected her own
considerable talents as a witty collage artist. Brice Marden and Jonas
Mekas, among others, collected her artworks, and Maurice Gerodias,
founder of The Olympia Press, took her with him on trips to Europe.
Kasoundra hung out with the Alice’s Restaurant crowd at
the church in the Berkshires, and acted in Harry Smith’s “Mahagonny.”
Her poster of Harry looking at himself in his own eyeglasses is a
sought-after treasure.
Flash-forward to January 2011, when Kasoundra was
discovered lying on the floor of her kitchen and transported to Lenox
Hill Hospital by Adult Protective Services. Kasoundra’s boyfriend had
run off with her roommate, and despite her bad liver, Kasoundra had
consumed an entire quart of vodka.
When her friends finally located her
in the hospital, she was yellow with jaundice.
The physically feisty Kasoundra bounced back soon enough,
but she was transferred to the hospital’s psych ward because she
complained of depression. This proved to be a dangerous disclosure,
because from that moment forward, Kasoundra was never to enjoy her
freedom again.
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| A self-portrait collage by Kasoundra Kasoundra. |
Although she has fought valiantly through three years of
court hearings with three successive judges, Kasoundra remains marooned
in a nursing home in New Rochelle with little hope of ever regaining her
liberty. How could this happen?
Kasoundra’s trials began with her
landlord. As she stayed in the psych ward month after month, her rent
fell increasingly behind, and the landlord sued for eviction. Kasoundra
paid him $2,000 as a gesture of good faith until she could return home
and get her affairs in order, but the landlord was not appeased and the
eviction proceeding continued.
Kasoundra had lived for 30 years in a rent-stabilized
apartment on the Upper East Side, and under SCRIE (Senior Citizen Rent
Increase Exemption) she paid $684 a month. With a modest renovation,
Kasoundra’s four-room apartment —particularly in view of the new Second
Ave. subway line — might easily fetch $3,500 per month in today’s
inflated real estate market. Such apartments have become valuable assets
to landlords, who often pay rent-stabilized tenants thousands of
dollars to move out.
Although the hospital helped Kasoundra acquire a pro bono
lawyer to stave off her eviction proceeding, the better course might
have been to help her set up an automated bill payment plan at her bank
so her rent could be paid on a timely basis.
Kasoundra’s next problem was that her medical condition,
hepatic encephalopathy, caused her liver function to wax and wane. This
condition (and/or the medication taken for it) can cause symptoms of
grogginess and occasional forgetfulness — side effects that dissipate
once the liver returns to normal and the medication is discontinued.
In the meantime, the psych ward social worker was
reluctant to send Kasoundra home to her apartment, a three-flight
walk-up. The staff considered that she might be better off living in
Lott House, an elegant, assisted-living facility in her neighborhood,
where she could occupy a studio apartment and have her meals served in
the spacious dining room with windows overlooking Central Park.
Kasoundra loved the park, and had once been a volunteer gardener there.
An appointment was made for a visit to Lott House, but
after Kasoundra’s initial interview, her social worker sat on the
application for months. No one helped Kasoundra apply for “Community
Medicaid,” which, in view of her meager Social Security income, would be
needed to pay for homecare services or for her residency at Lott House.
Instead, the hospital applied for and received a “hospital Medicaid”
payment for the hefty bill Kasoundra now owed the hospital.
As the year drew to a close, Kasoundra’s social worker,
who was about to retire, was under pressure to dispose of her cases.
Because Community Medicaid had not been set up, Kasoundra could neither
return home nor move into Lott House, and her social worker decided to
dispense with the problem by seeking a court-appointed guardian under
Article 81. For this purpose, Kasoundra was given the short form of the
R-Bans Mental Status Test, and the social worker said afterward that
Kasoundra had performed poorly “on one component of the test.”
On this flimsy basis, the hospital applied to the New York
State Supreme Court for a court-appointed guardian. Since Kasoundra had
been adopted and her adoptive parents had passed away, she had no one
who could intercede on her behalf or halt the impending termination of
her rights and ability to control her own destiny.
The first guardianship hearing took place
in December 2011. Although Kasoundra was never sent court papers (a
procedural violation), she asked one of her friends to inform the
judge’s clerk that she wanted a “trial by jury,” and that she did not
want the “court evaluator” to have access to her medical records, if the
evaluator was going to base a competency judgment on the results of the
paltry mental status test. Kasoundra was legally entitled to both of
these options, but her requests were ignored.
At the hearing, one of Kasoundra’s friends offered to
become her guardian, but the social worker spoke out against this
prospect, and the judge decided to appoint a professional guardianship
agency.
Ironically, just before the hearing took place,
Kasoundra’s latest liver test had come back “negative,” which meant that
her medication would be discontinued and her sporadic grogginess would
soon dissipate, which it subsequently did. But no doctor or social
worker from the hospital brought up the results of Kasoundra’s latest
liver test –– or its import –– at the hearing.
In her ruling, Judge Visitacion-Lewis stipulated that
Kasoundra should be returned home with appropriate homecare services
provided, or, if that proved too difficult because of the stairs,
Kasoundra should be placed in an assisted-living facility “in her
community.” (Since Lott House was the only such facility that accepted
Medicaid, it was not only the most desirable but also the only option.)
The judge also stipulated that the guardian should confer on all
important matters with Kasoundra and work closely with her friends to
insure that her needs were met. None of the judge’s directives were
followed.
Kasoundra’s third problem was her guardian, Judah Samet of
United Guardianship Services. Ignoring the judge’s orders, he promptly
whisked Kasoundra to a nursing home in New Rochelle — far from her
community and friends. Kasoundra was confined to a bed with a loud
buzzer that went off every time she tried to get out of bed. She
received no physical exercise, and soon her leg muscles began to
atrophy. Even after her friends discovered where she was, they were
unable to contact her because she had no working telephone. She remained
isolated and alone for months.
Finally one of her friends brought a psychiatrist to the
nursing home to evaluate Kasoundra. He gave her a routine mental status
test and determined that her cognitive functioning was normal. He saw no
reason why she should not live at home if she wished to do so. (
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The trials of collage artist Kasoundra Kasoundra
