Matthew was sent home early from work on July 29, 2008. He was having trouble working since he, at work, sustained an awful acid burn on both his feet some days earlier. (Despite his intelligence, he didn’t consider worker’s comp. Mom said when she called me on my birthday that it had something to do with his being afraid he wouldn’t make his usual amount.) He checked in with his mentor whom noted the unusually good mood he had been in as of late. Being a father was the only thing Matt had ever consistently wanted in his life; anybody observing him could tell how happy he was to be a dad. He placed a call to Mom and continued home.

Somewhere between the mentor’s office and his house, Matt received a text message from his fiancee, T------, telling him that while he was at work she had packed up and left him with their daughter, E--------. I’m not sure whether he made it home or not, but he went to our mom’s house.

When Mom answered the door, he asked to borrow her Makarov PM to go shooting in the desert with his best friend, J--. Not being an idiot, she flatly refused, sensing that something was amiss. Matt tried to gain entry into the house, but she stopped him. Matt gave up and drove to J--’s house.

J-- answered the door and Matt told him that our dad was waiting in his Mustang to go shooting in the desert together and asked to borrow a handgun. Now, I don’t know why J-- believed him. J-- knows Dad; anybody knowing Dad for more than three hours can tell you (a) Dad’s really lazy, (b) he hates guns, and (c) he hates going into the desert for ANYTHING in the Summer. J-- relinquished his gun and wanted to join Matt and Dad on the fictitious shoot. He went to get a shirt on, but when he returned to the door, Matt was already gone.

Sometime after Matt left Mom’s house and not long after he disappeared with J--’s gun, T------ wrote a text message to Mom telling her, “Don’t let Matt do anything stupid!” Upon further inquiry, she informed him how and when she had dumped Matt. Soon after, Mom received a frantic call from J-- about her missing son and his missing gun. Mom sent Matt a message asking what he was doing; he revealed that he was going to kill himself. Mom immediately called Matt, wrote him text messages and the like before she spoke to him. (I am not sure whether he answered or called her back.) Over the course of about five conversations, she had managed to discover where he was headed: a dry lake bed between Henderson and Boulder City, just off the turn to head to Needles, CA. (This is where Dad had attempted to teach Matt and I to drive years earlier.) She also got him to promise to call her back every time except the last when he told her, sobbingly, “I can’t promise you that, Mom.” He also asked her to tell everybody that he loved us.

J*******, our younger sister, had already called the police and Mom sped down the site along with J******* and her business partner, R--. She described seeing police cars whizz by. When she got there, a cruiser had beaten her to it and she was restricted from going near Matt’s car. Other cruisers, SWAT vehicles, and ambulances arrived until Mom’s party could barely see a thing.

The officers tried to negotiate with Matt to give himself up. According to the detective working on the case, they thought they had convinced him to quit after all. As he described it, Matt looked into the rear view mirror, then the side mirror, maybe was surprised by seeing someone moving closer and he pulled the trigger.

Nobody in Mom’s car could see or hear what had happened, but all the officers stood up at once. Mom thought it was all over and that she could scold Matt for all the stress he’d caused. J******* claimed to have seen Matt walk out of the car. Unfortunately, they were both mistaken. Matt’s limp-but-still-breathing body was pulled from the Mustang, placed on a gurney, and wheeled to the ambulance where rescue teams worked tirelessly to save my brother. Flight for Life arrived a few minutes after and rushed him to University Medical Center. Everybody in Mom’s car was trying to call other family members, but connections were hard to come by. By the time they reached the UMC parking lot, Mom reached me and told me what was happening. They had no clue that it was as bad as they could possibly have feared.

After he was cleaned up and connected to a wide array of life-sustaining machinery, they were allowed to see him. He was utterly unrecognizable, with the exception of his tattoos; his face was intact but terribly swollen. He hadn’t enough blood left to run the standard battery of tests, so fluid was taken from his liver for it. A couple of hours later, J******* called me, screaming in anguish and consumed in tears, that the doctor informed them that the bullet had gone right though his brain and only 1 in 99 ever survive the trauma. I echoed J*******.

After I hadn’t heard any news for nearly eight hours, so I figured that perhaps Matt was going to pull through. I thought I’d get the chance to go there myself to kick his disfigured-but-alive butt. I called Dad after midnight to be apprised of the situation. Dad said that they had been waiting hours for a brain scan to be run on Matt; that they needed to see whether there was any brain activity or blood flow to the brain left. Dad wasn’t hopeful; they had disconnected the ventilator earlier in order to run some test or other and he had gone into cardiac arrest and had to be defibrillated back to “life”. The results came back very late, at about 2:30 AM. Of course, they were all negative. They withdrew life support and held him as he died. He was utterly gone at 3:00 AM, but in Clark County, only the coroner can pronounce a death. The coroner’s office is, like everything there, understaffed. He was pronounced dead at 4:10 AM.

The coroner kept Matt’s body until Monday, when representatives of the crematorium where he used to work came to pick it up. Mom gave me the option to see the lifeless, mangled body of my little brother. Apparently, not only was he disfigured beyond easy recognition, but now he was also black and blue all over. I had mulled over this decision for days and, though I desperately wanted to see him again, decided not to. Whenever someone dies, all I can ever see when I think of them is just that lifeless form which was last presented to me. I couldn’t bear it. The last time I saw him was in June, and he was smiling. He rarely ever looked me in the face when he smiled, but bashfully looked down first, then up, taking a drag from the cigarette in-hand, were there one ready. Now that’s how I’ll always see him. Bashfully smiling, promising to see me again. Liar.