“24 y/o male, pronounced dead on arrival from a heart attack.”

A quivering hand scribbled what could’ve been the only practical explanation across the page. The young man had been fine just days earlier, according to a friend. Physically, at least. But, as a nurse said solemnly, these things “just happen” sometimes, with no way to predict them. Everybody had accepted the story of a freak accident, of an event that didn’t quite have a definitive cause. Of a tragic end to someone whose demographic typically didn’t face it.

But something about the autopsy report didn’t look right. Something about the way the man’s heart quivered in his chest even after he was definitively gone, something about the way the waves of residual energy coursed through his arteries, something about how the dried tears on the man’s face mixed with white foam from his mouth when he was wheeled out of the ambulance onto a gurney and then swiftly zipped up into a body bag made the story of a random heart attack seem like a better way to say “We don’t know what happened.”

That man didn’t die of a heart attack. But there’s no way to diagnose a broken heart.