In October 2017, Diane Norelius stopped answering the phone. Her two daughters called and called. They also called Diane’s boyfriend, Denzil Nelson. Every time Denzil answered, he just said, “She doesn’t want to talk to you.” But usually he didn’t answer. The women worried that her mother, who was 81, was sick or even dead. After a few days of radio silence, they flew home to Denison, Iowa, a city of about 8,000, surrounded by cornfields.
When Diane opened the door and saw her daughters standing on the lawn, she hesitated. She then looked at Denzil, who had come to stand next to her. “Can’t we go in, mom?” Juli Norelius, her youngest daughter, 59, remembers asking. The once scrupulously tidy farm looked neglected. Inside the kitchen, the landline phone was missing and the shelves were almost empty. Only the freezer was full, and only with ice cream. On the stove, there was a piece of duct tape with Denzil’s handwriting on it: “DO NOT USE.” Above a door frame, a large piece of wood blocked access to the stairs. Diane sat at the round table by the window. Her curly white hair, usually puffed up and arranged, fell flat around her neck. Her watch was backwards. She started to speak, but her words were slurred. After a while, she Diane went to her bedroom and lay face down on the bed.
Kris Norelius, Diane’s eldest daughter, 65, had always considered her mother a very intelligent but also “very childish” woman. Diane wanted to be taken care of, mainly by her husband, Bill. Throughout their decades of marriage, Bill gave Diane a weekly allowance, which she used to run the household. Otherwise, she took care of the practical financial matters. “I don’t know if I know anything about that kind of thing,” Diane later told her daughters. Diane raised money for the library and served on the local school board, but she always hurried to be on time to make Bill lunch. Every afternoon after school, she would summon her two daughters and her son, Erik, home with a big brass bell so they could stand at attention, their faces washed and their clothes presentable, when Bill came to dinner.
When Bill died from complications of a broken hip in 2011 after 53 years of marriage, Diane found herself alone for the first time. Then quickly she lost more people. Juli, who lived next door, divorced and moved to Colorado—the last of Norelius’s children to leave town. Erik then died of cancer at age 55. Diane and Erik had always been especially close: When Erik was a child, he used to throw up every morning before school because he didn’t want to leave his mother, and when he died in 2015, Diane began to fall apart. In the midst of it all, she fell in love again.
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