An excerpt from Kristin Prevallet’s I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time:
The narrative goes something like this:
My father walked into a hospital. Outpatient. He was suffering from severe panic attacks. He was sleeping two hours a night. He had to fill out a form: Name, address, birthdate. Is the patient suicidal? He checked “no.” The next week, he drove to a gun store and bought a revolver. The next week, he drove to a parking lot and shot himself in the head.
Before this, he made an appointment to see a psychiatrist, and got a prescription for Paxil. The psychiatrist gave him a form: Name, address, birthdate. Are you suicidal? He checked “no.” He only saw the doctor once.
There are numerous studies that link Paxil to suicide, not because he was depressed there is no reasonable proof that he was not suicidal before he took the Paxil. So this is a story that leaves a wide margin of doubt, a story that is not about probable cause.
On the day he died, November 20, 2000, it was overcast, but not too chilly. It’s possible that he had tried to go to the gym at 5 A.M. At some point, he bought The Denver Post because he used it to cover the windows of the car.
At 8 A.M. some kids from the neighborhood were on their way to the park. They saw the lone car in the parking lot, with the windows covered in newspaper. They peeked in and saw a man slumped over the steering wheel. One thought he saw blood on the man’s ear. They called the police.
The police came to the house and asked, “had the victim been expressing suicidal thoughts?” They gave my stepmother a pamphlet, which included advice on how not to feel guilty. The pamphlet advised against building a shrine.
My stepmother wanted to see the body, to say a proper goodbye. The police told her to call the coroner’s office. She called. They said, “You can’t see the body. We’ll leave his hand outside of the sheet for you.”
We collected dried flowers from the garden and wrote letters that so my father would have something to open when he woke up on the other side. Zinnias, peonies, poppies, and strawberry bush brambles. We were trying to fill in the gap.
The report from the scene is the police-side of the story. 1) They searched for a pulse. 2) They established identity. 3) They took photos. 4) They wrote down descriptive phrases. (They investigated to make sure no foul play was involved.)
No evidence exists to call this “murder” because it cannot be proven that any outside force caused this violence act to occur. Internal violence is too intangible to be considered “proof.”
So, as I was saying, after three days of being on Paxil, he drove eleven miles to Rocky Mountains Guns & Ammo on Parker Road and purchased a Colt revolver for $357. I asked my sister, “Who was driving? The man or the medicine?”
He signed a form: self protection. So, a man walks into a store and buys a gun for self protection. But self protection cannot protect the man from himself. I said to my brother, the logic escapes me.
The bumper sticker on his car read, “Conflict is inevitable, violence is not.” The police didn’t make a note of it on their report. The man who sold him the gun probably didn’t notice.
The scene: a baseball field, in the heart of Englewood, Colorado. A field, and behind the field, a thick grove of trees concealing a bike path. One single and solitary tree sits off to the side of the field. A parking lot. He parked the car in the eighth spot, facing the solitary tree. When I went to investigate a few days later, I found a pile of grass. From the evidence I deducted his location at the time of death.
But this is not the whole story. The whole story is gaping with holes. The “hole” story is conflicted, abstract, difficult to explain.
Sublimation: when solid becomes ether without passing through the liquid state. When the overflow of negative psychic energy is rechanneled into writing, or art. When the distance between living and dying is filled in with language, objects, people, and mundane activities, such as doing the dishes. When something difficult to articulate finds its form in poetry. When dead (silence) is brought back to life (mythology).
Regardless, the story has many possible forms and many angles of articulation. This is elegy.