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Reflections on a Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy Childhood as HULU premiers The Act
Coming Home — Part 1
Sometimes the right answers fall into your hands when you don’t even know you have a question.
My husband and I had been together less than three years when a chance encounter with a battered true crime paperback changed my life. I don’t read much true crime. I’d never heard of the author Joyce Egginton. And I’m not apt to pick up books about children or animals in distress.
But I picked up From Cradle to Grave and it made it to the top of the reading pile in short order, a sad but true account of Marybeth Tinning, who lost all nine of her children. That could have been something genetic, except that she also lost one adopted son, and he wasn’t a blood relative, and the fact that they didn’t all die in the same exact manner.
Sitting down to write this all these years later, I didn’t remember Marybeth’s name, or the details of how her children died, or that the first to die, her third born, died of natural causes. That first death was probably what kicked Marybeth’s illness into gear when there was an outpouring of sympathy and support from friends, family, husband, community and the medical staff working with her daughter.
