Today marks 428 days since mom died.

On August 17th, 2012 — less than a week after mom died — I wrote the following to a woman named Michelle Cofano, who worked (works?) for the State of Florida Department of Elder Affairs:

The doctor who was caring for my mother refused to sign the death certificate because he said, “I don’t know why she died. She shouldn’t have died,” and, “I want them to perform an autopsy,” and, “An autopsy will give us the answers.”

Then the Volusia County Medical Examiner decided that an autopsy wasn’t necessary; that my mother died “of natural causes”. They are not interested in the facts that she had a heart attack just after a psychiatrist who had never seen her before, who had only one session with her which lasted less than an hour — and truthfully probably lasted less than fifteen minutes — prescribed a highly, highly risky drug, which comes with multiple warnings from its manufacturer not to use in elderly patients with dementia and only to use as a last resort for schizophrenics, and then only if a doctor can vigilantly monitor the patient’s cardiac functions because the risk of a heart attack is so high, without ever anyone saying that my mom had schizophrenia, a drug that I begged doctors to stop giving her in January, a drug that I spent hours and hours on the phone with the nursing home begging them not to give her, a drug that they told me they would NOT give her …

And suddenly — when he learned there would be no autopsy — the doctor changed his mind and signed the death certificate.

My mother is dead. She’ll never get to know her grandson. I’ll never hear her voice again.

And nobody cares.

And nobody cares.