TRUMAN was still a month away from his sixtieth birthday when he reached Los Angeles on the afternoon of Thursday, August 23, 1984. But a Polaroid picture Joanne took that evening shows the face of an older man, so tired that his features are almost indistinct, as if they were made of melting wax. He seemed to revive the next day, but his weariness returned on Saturday. When Joanne went to wake him early in the morning, he said he was still tired and wanted to sleep. When she tried to rouse him at noon, he was dead.
That, in any event, was the story Joanne told the police and reporters. But that, as she later confided, was not what happened.
What happened was that when she came to wake him that Saturday morning, probably around 7:30, he looked so pale and exhausted that she felt his pulse, which was fluttery. She thought that breakfast might pick him up, but he prevented her from leaving, grabbing her hand and pulling her down beside him on his bed. “No,” he said, “stay here.”
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No, I’m not,” he answered. “But I soon will be.”
“Truman, I think I want to call the paramedics,” she said, starting to rise. Once again he held her down, and for the next three and possibly four hours he talked and talked, until he could talk no longer.
The autopsy, which was performed by the Los Angeles County coroner, could find no “clear mechanism of death,” as doctors like to phrase it. “It has been determined that he died as the result of liver disease which was complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication” was all the coroner’s office could say. But in fact he had shown no symptoms of serious liver disease. His liver had been tested by Southampton Hospital just a few weeks earlier, and the worst that could be said about it was that it was precirrhotic—that it showed signs, in other words, of the cirrhosis that might come. The doctors at the coroner’s office seemed puzzled.
What, then, killed him? Since there was no alcohol in his blood—for once, he had not been drinking—the most likely culprit was those beautiful little pills he loved to cuddle. In the hours and days before his death he had consumed great quantities of drugs: Valium, Dilantin, codeine, Tylenol and two or three different barbiturates. The Valium alone, about forty milligrams, was enough to put a person who was not accustomed to it, as Truman was, into such a stupor that a shout in the ear would not have awakened him. A healthy person might have survived such an assault on the system. An unhealthy person, particularly one with the slight liver problem Truman had, might not have, and there is every possibility that he took a fatal overdose. The only outstanding question can never be answered. Was it a deliberate or an accidental overdose?
What probably happened, in any event, was that, as a result of a drug overload, he suffered a cardiac-rhythm disorder, a disruption of the normal electrical signals to the heart. Joanne’s readings of his pulse support such a conclusion. A disorder of that kind, which is common in alcoholics, would not show up in an autopsy. It can last for hours, during which time the victim can talk, and talk lucidly, as Joanne said that Truman did. It can also be interrupted if the victim receives medical attention. If the paramedics had been called, Truman’s life probably could have been saved. But that, clearly, he did not want, and perhaps it is not important to ask whether he had tried to commit suicide: even if he had, he had been given a reprieve, a second chance. But given a choice between life and death, he chose death.
When Truman was a child of five or six in Monroeville, someone gave him a miniature airplane that he could pedal around the yard like a tricycle. It was a vivid green, with a bright red propeller, and one day Truman told his envious friends that he was going to fly, that he was going to take off down that dusty street in front of Jennie’s house, rise above the trees beyond, and soar across the oceans to China, that serene and mysterious land that he often dreamed about. He had convinced everyone, including himself, and furiously he pedaled, faster and faster… But he went nowhere at all. Now, sitting in his bedroom in Joanne’s house, knowing that something was terribly wrong with him, he was to have his wish.
“Truman, I think you’re in a little trouble,” Joanne said once more. “Let me call the doctor. We can get you to the hospital.”
“No,” he replied. “I don’t want to go through that again. No more hospitals. My dear, I’m so very tired. If you care about me, don’t do anything. Just let me go. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’ve decided to go to China, where there are no phones and there is no mail service.” He continued to talk, about his mother mostly, but also about his writing and Answered Prayers. Like leaves falling gently from a tree, he had promised its ending would be, and that is how his own last hours ended, as his life slowly drifted away. As his pulse grew weaker, his conversation was reduced to phrases. “Beautiful Babe” was one. “Mama, Mama” was another. Finally: “It’s me, it’s Buddy”—Buddy was Sook’s nickname for him. “I’m cold,” he said at last. Sometime before noon his breathing stopped, and Joanne called the paramedics, who pronounced him dead at 12:21 P.M.
And so, moment by moment, he had returned to the beginning.