Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, at the Blue House, her family home in Mexico City, at age 47. Her death certificate gives a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot that blocks an artery in the lung.
That is the official cause, and the most likely one. No autopsy was done, however, and the gap has left room for two other explanations, an accidental overdose of painkillers or a suicide.
An embolism fits the state she was in. Such a clot usually forms in a deep vein of the leg and travels up to the lungs, and the risk rises after surgery and long weeks in bed, which is how Frida spent her last months.
Her health had been poor since she was eighteen, when a streetcar crashed into the bus she was riding. An iron handrail went through her pelvis, and her spine and right leg were broken in several places.
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The pain never left her, and the operations followed one another for the rest of her life. In 1953 her right leg was amputated below the knee because of the threat of gangrene. After that she depended more and more on painkillers, and she was more confined than ever.
Frida's last public appearance, a march on July 2
Her doctors had ordered her to stay in bed. Eleven days before her death, on July 2, 1954, she left it anyway, and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, took her out into the streets of Mexico City…
What You'll Discover
What she gave Diego that night.
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What the certificate left out.
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