Read John's coronor's report a few days ago. It did a lot to help us with what we wanted to know--was it painless? Did he at least go quickly? swimcoyote, a very old, very dear friend of John's, well, not old chronologically, but they go back a while, is a medical student, and helped me through the more difficult bits. She's posted her analysis to her LJ, it's a bit frank and graphic, but informative, if you need that sort of information for closure.


I confess, I got very caught up in the wording of the report, since I was probably trying to distract myself from what I was reading. Here's Swimcoyote's review of the report. A lot of it boils down to "with the kind of damage that he took, he was instantly unconscious." Though there's a lot more detail. I did find it useful, since I'd of course been wondering.

There were some genuinely lovely sections of the coronor's analysis. I was particularly taken with "The meninges were smooth and glistening. The cerebral hemispheres were symmetrical in shape and contour and the brain weighed 1300 grams. On section, the gray and white matter were well demarcated." Okay, maybe a bit morbid, but I'll remember "The meninges were smooth and glistening" for a long time, though I had to look up "meninges." And with a degree of "these circumstances are terrible, but at least he was wearing clean underwear," I was pleased to read that he appeared to be well-nourished. So, my dilligent effort and Nasco's frequent trips to Dim Sum Breakfast paid off.

There was other stuff, of course. It was a point-by-point description of the body, there was a lot of information there. One sad marker--besides the overall context, viz., "coroner's examination of a lot of people's best friend, in a non-living mode," which pretty much defines sad--to clarify, they use the word "unremarkable" where less precise people would say "normal." Somewhere in the report was buried this phrase: ..."with unremarkable testes in scrotal sac." I know that's not how John (or indeed, almost any male) would want to be remembered. I say we remember him as having remarkable testes. I'm sure he would prefer that.

Best wishes,
Jacob