Men's Journal writes of his long decline to suicide.
From the piece...
We know what happened on Sunday morning, July 2, 1961. A writer who’d lost the prairies of his childhood in Illinois, the woods of his Michigan teenage summers, the seemingly illimitable fishing riches of the Gulf Stream off Havana, and now, or so he was convinced, the center of who and what he was stepped inside a five-and-a-half-by-seven-and-a-half-foot space at the entryway of his Idaho house and destroyed himself.
He aimed for just above the eyebrows, and nothing went awry. He’d been home from Mayo Clinic for two days, having been driven back from Minnesota to Ketchum in a Hertz rental car in the company of his wife and an old boxing friend whose Manhattan gym he used for his workouts. His wife had gone to bed the night before in the big bedroom that occupied most of the upper floor of their charmless two-story block house, which sat a couple of hundred yards up the steep slope from the west bank of the Big Wood River. He’d taken the small room down the hall.
From their respective bathrooms, as they readied for sleep, they’d called out to each other snatches of an Italian folk song. At about 7:25 am, Mary Hemingway was brought awake to what sounded like two muffled thumps. It was, she later said, like the sound of bureau drawers pulled out too far and falling to the floor. She rose on one elbow and called out her husband’s name. She threw back the coverlet and ran down the hall. One of the twin beds was mussed, but he wasn’t in it. She reversed direction, went to the head of the stairs, held for half a second, and tore down the 20-odd steps, across the living room to see what her husband had done.
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