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.
