Patient Five: Martín Cafrune

Martin Cafrune was my first brush with professional tragedy. I did not actually get to know him. In fact, we met only once. But I eventually found out the fate of the man who had laid for approximately forty-five minutes on my couch discussing his main concern. Martin Cafrune committed suicide two days after his session with me. He was thirty.

The motive for his visit was not, at least superficially, extraordinary. He feared death and had trouble dealing with the anxiety that such terror generated in him. What made that anguish tick, however, was unusual. The chap believed he had an allotted amount of words he could write before losing his life.

Naturally, this implied he avoided any type of written means of communication. Letters and e-mails, he refused to answer or send. Text messages and WhatsApp or Telegram, too. He preferred calling. His excuse was that he was old school. He had no social media, although he did use Instagram for a short spell. Pictures with no captions, of course! But alas, the written word is not unavoidable, though. His main enemy, he conceded, was bureaucracy. Not only the government-sponsored, tedious, repetitive kind of paper pushing and data registration but any type. Let us say he wanted to join a club. Just presenting him with the registration form was enough for him to desist.

In essence, he was perfectly happy with the spoken word or sending wordless, pre-fabricated memes. At a psychologist’s office, where all he had to do was talk, the man was in his element. He even sounded chirpy and amused when he spoke about it with me. He admitted he understood that his ailment sounded absurd. I tried to explain to him that obsession and neurosis were perfectly reasonable elements of the human mind. I managed to see a micro expression of relief. I tried to coax a hypothesis from him which could explain the origin of his predicament. He didn’t know. All he was certain about was that he had a predetermined amount of words he could write in his life. My next question was if he knew what was the actual amount he had. Apparently, he did, but no matter how hard I pressed him, he just wouldn’t reveal it to me. He was more straightforward with his uncertainty of the words consumed until now, so to speak. He could not account for things written as a child. Obviously, this made the whole issue take a more desperate colour in his mind.

I suggested a few alternatives, such as dictating what he wanted to someone. He said he’d thought of it, but he felt that the counter was still going down. “I cannot cheat death”, he mumbled. Sheepishly, I muttered that no one could. Not my finest moment, perhaps. But he took it on the chin, like a champ.

We split up on uneasy vibes. Weary, actually. I wondered how to help him. How to convince him that his fate was not set in stone? I hoped I could give him something to work on in the next sessions. But nothing sprang to my mind.

Two days later I got a call from his brother, who shared with me the news of his suicide. He’d left a note, written all over the wall of his flat. The result of his gunshot wound to the head acted as a twisted crimson signature. Overcome with a sudden grief, I cancelled all appointments, and I cried.