‘MINS’

My son’s official death certificate arrived the other day. It is his only obituary. A minimalist statement, devoid of drama. As cold and sterile as his death was not. A final testimony to the emptiness that had enveloped his life and engulfed his last months.

CAUSE OF DEATH: SHARP FORCE INJURIES TO THE WRIST AND NECK

It was a raw, vicious cut, either done with surgical precision or extreme dumb luck that managed to slice open an artery just so. Too much trauma and the artery would suck back into the body and stem the bleeding. And he only had one shot at it, too: there would be no way to effectively slash the second arm after damaging the first. That’s apparently where the knife to the throat came in; that must have been made with his “good hand,” it was his “insurance,” I’m sure of it.

I’ve had a “working copy” of this document for a couple of weeks, and though I’ve read it a 1,000 times already, on my 1,001st time I noticed an annotation I’d overlooked before, it reads: Time Interval Between Onset and Death: MINS

The onset of “the act” to the end of his life took mere MINS, coroner shorthand for “minutes.” I had to look it up.

“If a large blood vessel is severed or lacerated, a person can bleed to death in one minute or less… Rapid loss of one quart or more of the total blood volume often leads to irreversible shock and death.” Source: Thomas, Lowell J. First Aid for Backpackers and Campers, p. 7; Thygerson, Alton L. First Aid Essentials, p. 53.

MINS

He smoked a few cigarettes while deciding the staging for his Last Act; I counted three butts in his room, two on the floor and one in his bed. He must have chain-smoked them to get the cheap nicotine buzz I’d seen him write about before; it must have been particularly heady this time because he’d been “clean” for 14 days according to a “Quit Smoking Tally” he kept in his last journal.

MINS

July 14th — One day people, probably not very many at the rate I’m going, will read my journals and wonder how I managed to stay alive as long as I did. It is not complicated. For as much as I think about exterminating myself, I am afraid of dying. So the only times I attempt suicide are those when the pain of existence outweighs the fear of death, and even then I have, so far, left some sort of escape hatch, but that will fail me one day and I will experience a brief moment of pure, unadulterated terror when I realize I am really about to die, followed by relief and then nothing.

MINS

There was no return from this attempt; he left himself no “escape hatch.” There was nothing left to say and everything to say, but he had no words, a crisis of character for a writer. The last 13 words he had in him he left on the page in the form of his suicide note, and then he took his life.

Time Interval Between Onset and Death:

MINS