by ALEXANDRA SPUNT

Micheline Handfield, 74, had lived in Le Châtelain, an apartment building at 175 Sherbrooke W., since 1982. After a fall in May 2002, she was hospitalized and then sent to the Montreal Chest Institute, where she has been ever since. Despite her absence, Handfield continued to pay her rent, which was always delivered by a friend prior to the first of every month. The cheques were cashed without delay by the building owners.

This past March, while still at the Chest Institute, Handfield received a lease renewal notice asking if she would be staying on in the building and indicating a rent hike of $200 a month; she responded that, yes, she would be staying on but that she did not accept the 33 per cent increase in rent, and to please contact the Régie in order to come to a more appropriate (and legal) amount for them to settle on. This letter is now among a stack that Handfield has kept, carefully piled in chronological order, to document her struggle of the last months.

Handfield is now in a wheelchair; however, she is lucid and independent, capable of taking care of herself, as substantiated by Susan Purcell, a social worker at the Chest Institute who has been following her case. By May of this year, she was ready to return to her home of 21 years, wanting first to make slight adjustments in the apartment to ease the transition back to ordinary life - to install a microwave, as well as a shower contraption.

Humans as hazards

"On May 16," Handfield says, "I returned to the apartment with people from the CLSC who were going to help me make the installations." However, when a member of the CLSC went to ask that a janitor witness the changes, the building owner, Isaac Gelber, denied the request, saying that Handfield was not supposed to be in the apartment. When Handfield returned to the building the next week, accompanied by Purcell, the lock on her apartment had been changed, and the superintendent, Dorothy Bond, claimed not to have the key. May's rent, of course, was already cashed.

The Mirror spoke with Gelber who, after claiming he did not know who Handfield was ("There are so many tenants," he says), stated that not letting her back in was for her own good. "She's a fine lady," he says, "but she's an invalid and I can't be held responsible if something happens."

After first denying that he knew about the changed lock, he went on to say that, "We needed to protect her belongings and we didn't even know where she was." The correspondence between the two parties, however, indicates otherwise.

After receiving a notice that she could not return to her home because she was a "fire hazard," Handfield decided that she was not prepared to wage war, writing to Gelber: "I am elderly and cannot deal with the stress of fighting for my rights, which you are infringing upon by refusing to let me return home… I trust my locks will not have been changed when I start visiting to pack my belongings in future days." A few days later someone dropped a key off for her.

"The worst is that, to this day, they have not spoken to me, they haven't even seen me - It's like I don't exist," she says, tears welling up in her eyes. "And now I have to look for a home."

Most residences for the elderly prioritize rooms for patients with the greatest need for care. Laughing through tears at the irony, Handfield says, "I'm not even sick enough!"