Maria M. Gentile, age 35, died in a car accident on July 23, according to her partner, Kathy Pettinato, who survived the crash with minor injuries. Pettinato, who was driving, was wearing a seatbelt, Gentile was not. Pettinato said their 1986 Chevy Blazer, rolled into a ravine when she swerved to avoid hitting a deer.
      A report in the Rutland Herald said that according to police, Pettinato was “processed for drunken driving after the accident.”
      The two women had been together for four years and had moved to Vermont from Connecticut in December 2001. They had begun volunteering for Out in the Mountains distributing papers in the Manchester, Vermont area in May.
      Gentile, a former social worker in Massachusetts, had helped to found the consumer-based mental health movement in Connecticut, said Pettinato. Gentile herself had been diagnosed with major depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to her partner. The two women met as volunteers for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. They had been planning for a civil union in the near future.
      Pettinato said that at least in part because of her partner’s disability, they had no legal documents to provide for each other in the event one partner died. “The house is in probate,” said Pettinato. “I guess her parents have hired an estate lawyer. But her parents are supportive – they told me to take whatever I wanted. I don’t want anything, but just to have my friend back.” While Gentile’s parents, siblings, and nieces and nephews were listed in the obituary in the Brattleboro Reformer, Pettinato was not.
      Pettinato said she doesn’t know whether she’ll stay in Vermont – in part it depends on what happens when her partner’s estate is settled. “I just don’t want to end up like that movie – If Walls Could Talk 2.”
      Gentile was buried in Brattleboro, said Pettinato, because her family knew she was very happy there. “They allowed her to be buried with the rings that I gave her,” Pettinato said in a phone interview. But Pettinato doesn’t have the rings that Gentile gave her. “I took them off when I was trying to dig her out and they were stolen.”
      Donations in Maria Gentile’s memory can be made to any animal welfare organization in honor of Gentile’s work with animals.