In October 2017, Diane Norelius stopped answering the phone. Her two daughters called and called. They called Diane’s boyfriend, Denzil Nelson, too. Whenever Denzil picked up, he would only say, “She doesn’t want to talk to you.” But usually, he didn’t pick up. The women worried that their mother, who was 81, was sick, or maybe even dead. After a few days of radio silence, they flew home to Denison, Iowa, a town of around 8,000 people, surrounded by cornfields.
When Diane answered the door and saw her daughters standing on the lawn, she hesitated. Then she looked over at Denzil, who had come to stand by her side. “Can’t we come in, Mom?” Juli Norelius, her younger daughter, who is 59, remembers asking. The farmhouse, once scrupulously tidy, looked unkempt. Inside the kitchen, the landline phone was missing, and the shelves were nearly bare. Only the freezer was full — and only with ice cream. On the stove, there was a piece of masking tape with Denzil’s handwriting on it: “DO NOT USE.” On a door frame, a large piece of wood blocked access to the staircase. Diane sat down at the round table, by the window. Her curly white hair, usually puffed and set, lay flat around her neck. Her watch was on upside-down. She started speaking, but her words were slurred. After a while, Diane went to her bedroom and lay facedown on the bed.
Kris Norelius, Diane’s older daughter, who is 65, had always considered her mother a very intelligent woman but also “very childlike.” Diane wanted to be taken care of — mostly by her husband, Bill. Throughout their decades of marriage, Bill gave Diane a weekly allowance, which she used to run the household. Otherwise, he took care of practical financial matters. “I don’t know if I know the first thing about that sort of thing,” Diane later told her daughters. Diane raised money for the library and served on the local school board, but she always hurried home in time to fix Bill his lunch. Every afternoon, after school, she summoned her two daughters and her son, Erik, home with a large brass bell so that they could be standing at attention — faces washed, clothing presentable — when Bill arrived for supper.
When Bill died of complications from a broken hip in 2011, after 53 years of marriage, Diane found herself alone for the first time. Then, promptly, she lost more people. Juli, who lived next door, divorced and moved to Colorado: the last of the Norelius kids to leave town. Then Erik died of cancer at age 55. Diane and Erik had always been especially close — when Erik was a boy, he used to vomit every morning before school because he didn’t want to leave his mama — and when he died in 2015, Diane started to unravel. In the midst of it all, she fell in love again.