Taxman*

Fact: The first sign of heart attack for most people is death.

I think about death a lot mostly because I’m afraid of it, and I know it’s going to arrive too soon. I also think about death a lot because, frankly, I was raised on night time dramas: cop shows (and now the forensic analysis shows), medical shows, and lawyer shows all deal with death to a greater or lesser extent. Too, the way I’m bent as a reader and writer has led me to a lot of mysteries, more true-crime than is probably good for me, and the unavoidable, and often inescapably bad, private eye novel.

The upshot is that I’ve thought a lot about death and the ways it can be administered. It’s oddly simple, boiling down to just five different categories with a lot of different methods in those categories:

• poisoning: includes the obvious like arsenic and cyanide but it also includes the possibly not so obvious like dioxin and other chemical toxins as well as alcohol, caffeine, and just about every pharmaceutical, illicit or otherwise, known to man.
• suffocation: drowning and strangulation (manual or ligature) are but two examples. Suck all the oxygen out of a sealed room with a bunch of halon and you’ve got a tailor-made suffocation chamber.
• exsanguination (which is just a fancy word for saying: blood loss so total it’s fatal): typically, but not uniquely, caused by your average stab wound.
• blunt force trauma: blow to the head, leaping off a building, and yes, electric shock (technically, an electric shock is considered a crush injury) are all classic examples in this category.

and last, but by no means least,

• deprivation: withholding of food and water are the two most common methods here.

I think, though, that last category is incomplete. I’ve been wondering lately if it’s possible to die of joy deprivation, if it’s possible to “sad” someone else, or yourself, to death. I hope I never find out but some days I’m afraid I will.

^* Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. – Benjamin Franklin