What were they like, the final minutes of his life? Was he resolute, calm, even liberated, as he hovered between life and death? I imagined him swimming to the surface after eons of holding his breath. Astonished by the details of the moment. The vanilla smell of pine bark, the peeling paint on the deck floor. The morning sun, bright as a headache. I wanted to believe that he had found some sense of peace as he uncoiled our climbing rope.
The coroner told me that he had left a sweater and an unfinished cup of coffee on the deck and then hanged himself that morning. I pictured his ceramic mug with the drippy blue glaze. I pictured the dawn light on the ponderosa pines. I pictured a tidy knot in the red rope.
After talking to my friend with bipolar disorder, my narrative shifted.
“During my suicide attempt,” she said, “I was anything but clear. I was frenzied, distraught, completely irrational.”
Now, in my mind, Randy was desperate. He woke, overcome with anxiety, and sobbed into his morning coffee. He fumbled clumsily with the rope. He made an impulsive choice.
Unable to bear the uncertainty, I invented dozens of scenarios, obsessed about where and when he had done it. I wallowed in regret and scolded myself for abandoning him, for shielding our kids from him and his depression, for avoiding eye contact whenever he came over unannounced.
At the same time, I hated him for discarding his life and leaving no explanation, no note, no goodbye for our children. I hated him for the gash he left on their souls.
Desperately, I dreamed up an act of divine intervention. A hummingbird darted into the scene. Small, emerald and effervescent. It paced in the air around his head.
It opened its beak and spoke.
“Live,” it said.
Randy started up in his chair. The creature hovered, inches from his face, wings so quick they purred.
“Live,” it said, again.
It took four years before I had the courage to read the autopsy report, and immediately I wished I hadn’t. The level of detail was haunting, right down to the color of his shirt, the weight of his heart, the ligature of black webbing around his neck. There was no red climbing rope, there was no hummingbird, there was nothing to reveal his state of mind. As for the choreography of the scene, I had imagined it all wrong.
The coroner recorded every physical detail, reducing his body to a laboratory specimen, but there were no answers to my questions there. His spirit, his anguish and his thoughts had vanished beyond my reach.