I Lose My Mother

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A few months later, on November 17th of that year, my mother died in a nursing home in Florida. According to her autopsy the cause of her death was "blunt head trauma." She was beaten numerous times in the chest and head while lying in her bed in the nursing home. The staff said she fell on the floor. I have never believed this.

She had been married to a man she met about eight years earlier, over the Internet, and throughout their strained marriage he had convinced her to turn against nearly everything she had formerly cherished: her children, her grandchildren, her sister, her religion, her political party, even her first husband — our dad. We could never understand why she suddenly wanted nothing to do with her family photo albums or why she returned her grandchildren's pictures, but we had an idea. As it turned out, her husband was a manipulative and abusive man who, I believe, poisoned her against her family.

For years she had been telling us that this man had been abusing her, and even though we and the local social services in her city looked into these allegations, we ended up taking her husband's word who told us she was fabricating these allegations of abuse in order to get the best of an argument they were having. We believed him, because like many people, we believed this to be true about domestic violence allegations in general — that they are often used to gain the upper hand in couple disputes. We believed this because it's true. False allegations of domestic abuse are often used for this purpose, with few, if any, consequences for those making the allegations. That's not to say there aren't consequences. There are, but often they are to those who the laws were made for, as was the case with my mother. We believed her husband, and left it at that, and this turned out to be tragic for her.

I'll never live down the fact that I failed to listen to my mother's cries for help, but I vow to never ignore anyone's pleas for help again — especially when it's a family member. We still don't know who killed my mother. In December of that year I went to her funeral by myself.