Near Death
Hex
Zine #52—April 2026
Near Death is a collection of short personal essays from Hex’s blog:
write.as/hexmhell/
You can also listen to Near Death as an audio feature on the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast below, as well as hear an interview with Hex about the piece.
The Sound of Rushing Water (2020.12.25)
As I write this, in 3 weeks it will have been four years since an intoxicated Trump supporter shot me. After my third surgery, my surgeon told me how close the bullet had been to the artery that runs in to my heart.
“Most people shot there just bleed out on the spot. The blood just dumps out like rushing water. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
His ability to repair a tattoo was top notch. His human skills were perhaps not quite as adept at times. This seems to be how surgeons are, in my experience, but I still enjoyed chatting with him.
This injury was not unfamiliar to me. In general, my dad didn’t really tell stories about Vietnam. So on the rare occasions he did, I listened. He only told this story once, but I paid close attention.
No one expected the Tet Offensive, since Tet is Vietnamese New Year. An offensive in asymmetric warfare isn’t always what one would think of as a military action. Though most of the offensive involved soldiers fighting each other, other things happened as well.
American soldiers were having dinner in the mess hall when the bomb went off. Apparently putting a landmine under a stack of plates in a mess hall wasn’t an uncommon way to carry out such an attack. Aside from the shrapnel from the mine, the plates shattered and plate fragments became projectiles.
There was a tiny hole in the man’s chest. My dad never talked about the blood, just that the hole was tiny and that there was no time. This man died in my dad’s arms in minutes. There was no time to operate, no time to act. My dad, who was a medic, was completely powerless in the situation. There was just a tiny hole, the sound of rushing water, and then a dead man in his arms.
I saw my dad cry once, at my grand father’s funeral. The war took away pieces of him one by one. He tore a ligament in his knee chasing a fellow soldier who’d just snapped and run off in to the jungle. There were no other medics in his unit, so he stayed until he could be relieved. By that time there was nothing anyone could do for his knee. After decades of pain, he’s now in a wheel chair.
Growing up I remember how often he had knee or back pain. This body was permanently scarred by the war. I knew that story. When he told the story about the mess hall, I started to understand the other scars.
Now I have my own.
[Added 2025.04.10]
I couldn’t convey the emotion. I still can’t. There are simply cold facts. I stare off, after reading this, to some distant place with a gaze that lacks focus. I can feel it. It’s the same stare, same cold recounting of facts, I recognize in the memory of my dad telling me about the Tet offensive.
He couldn’t have seen this coming. I expected to leave his trauma in the past, not to see it revisited on us for another generation. I look at my daughter, who’s six now, playing happily in the water.
There’s a strange continuity to history, one that doesn’t come through the stories of wars told from the perspective of nobles and presidents.
She asked me once, “Papa, when will I get my scars like you?”
Reflections on Park Güell (2025.04.25)
As my daughter takes pictures of the mosaics in Park Güell, studying them and saying how beautiful they are, I wonder if this place will be something that influences her. At 6, she loves to draw and do basic paper crafts. Her mother went to art school, I went a different route but I loved art as a kid. She has so much potential, if we can keep up with it. If…
I think of the career aptitude test I took in highschool when they told me I should be a sniper, I think of the military recruiters constantly in the halls handing out pamphlets, of the impossibly of imagining going to college. Then I think of the joy I find in math… A joy that I didn’t discover until years after I left school. I wonder at the years I’ve worked in my ducttape job in the security industry, an industry that is a monument to the wastefulness of capitalism, an industry that rightfully shouldn’t exist.
What would the world be like if Kalashnikov lived in a time when he could have worked on farm equipment? Could he have revolutionized agriculture instead of combat? There is a world in which Nazis never existed, and farmers swear by the indestructible Kalashnikov tractor. It’s impossible to calculate the loss of technology and culture that war and authoritarianism continues to impose on us all.
The Stephen Jay Gould quote is evergreen: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”.
Looking out over Barcelona, at Sagrada Familia from Park Güell, there are so many beautiful things humans have created with only the smallest portion of the population free to create them. Meanwhile, the majority of our abilities are wasted to make sure that pool of people stays small… And even those few privileged people spend most of their time and effort figuring out how to stay on top. It’s as though the myth that humans only use 1% of our brains were true, but at the global, not individual, level.
How much more could we have if we stopped wasting so much on maintaining involuntary hierarchy? How many generations of children will we betray to keep it?
I love the joy she finds in her art, her pictures. I hope she learns to find the joy of math that I only found so much later. I hope her love of nature lets her make beautiful things for humans. I hope she inherits a world that’s free, because it’s cruel to leave it to her to fight for it. I hope that my generation doesn’t allow the same cruelty to be inflicted on our children that our parents allowed to be inflicted on us.
Anxiety, Guilt, Sadness, and Independence (2025.05.23)
“Notice the sensations in your body. Do any of them have an emotional charge?”
I went to a meditation group this evening that focused on emotion. It was a group for men, put together by a men’s group focused on dismantling patriarchy. Suppressing and disconnecting from emotions is deeply connected to oppression. The emotional burden of oppressing others is easier to bear when you feel nothing, as is the shame and anger of being oppressed.
Feeling people don’t make decisions to ruin people’s lives, poison the land, steal the future from their own children. Feeling people can’t tolerate others doing the same. Numbness is the bedrock of authoritarianism.
“Put your hand where you feel the sensation.”
It’s hard for me to notice emotions most of the time.
My dad was happy or angry, sometimes disappointed, or asleep. I saw him cry once, when his dad died. I love my dad, but there’s also a distance. I don’t really see him or talk to him much. I didn’t talk to him for like 5 years.
I recently watched a video that resonated with me pretty intensely. My mom completely failed to prepare me for life, but my dad pushed me hard to be independent. I respect and appreciate him for it, even when I have some issues with it.
It took a while to find it, but eventually I did.
Anxiety.
I touch a scar on the left side of my belly. There was a tube there draining some fluid or other. It was the second one they pulled out, some days after the one in my right lung.
There’s not really a way to describe that feeling. The tube was up against my intestines. It slid against them and hit them as it came out. There was a bit of pain, like the lingering ache after being hit in the stomach, but perhaps a bit less. The real feeling was anxiety… overwhelming anxiety.
Somewhere, somehow, deep in our animal brain, the feeling of even the slightest intestinal trauma is intimately connected with death. Any human, or almost any animal, who felt something like I had felt, any longer than, say, 100 years ago, would have died a slow and excruciatingly painful death. Somehow, even knowing consciously that I am safe, my body knows only terror and can’t help but bring this to my consciousness.
In the book “To The American Indian: Reminisces of a Yurok Woman,” there were a few passages about Yurok beliefs (as she held them) on death. The part that’s stuck with me is roughly this. When a person dies, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they’re not good people, the dogs will eat them and if they’re good people the dogs will let them past. But sometimes, the soul runs instead. If it escapes, the person can come back to life. But even though they escape, for the rest of their life they will be pursued by dogs. Eventually the dogs will catch and kill them.
It’s a pretty spot on description of the experience of PTSD.
Trauma tunes people to spot threats, to see danger. Under normal conditions, they see danger where there isn’t any. But under extreme conditions, we see danger that other people are too complacent to see.
“Give the feeling space. Ask it what it needs.”
I’m afraid. I’m afraid and sad. My youngest is 6 now. She’s growing up so fast, and I push her hard to grow up faster. I feel like I’m missing out on her being young, like I’m trying to race through it, and I know it’s vanishing quickly. I feel guilt for pushing so hard.
A staple in my intestines came out. Before I came out of the bathroom, I hit the emergency button. I walked a couple of steps and then crumbled to the floor. I lay on the floor unable to move, trying to yell with all my might but barely making any sound. No one came as I struggled to whisper “help.” When they finally came, they picked me up off the floor and rushed me to emergency surgery.
The blood they put in me was cold. My arm was freezing as they put bag after bag of blood in to my body, and I bled it out almost as fast. When I was first shot, I didn’t think I would die. I thought it was possible, I prepared myself for it, but I knew there was a good chance I would make it. I knew that if I did die there, I would be proud of it. It would be a good death. I could die peacefully, if I needed to, but I was going to fight because people needed me. When I was bleeding out in the emergency room, I knew I was going to die and I was terrified. It was a completely different experience.
As I was shitting gallons of blood, I thought of the Don Hertzfeldt “My spoon is too big” animation. I thought of the part where the character says “my anus is bleeding” as the room fills with blood. It was slightly funny, but mostly an unimaginably horrible way to die. And I was sure I was going to die.
The anxiety never went away.
I push my oldest hard to be independant because I can’t know how long I can be there for her. They saved my life, but it’s not that simple. The x-rays, the surgeries, the things they put in my body, all of it shortens my life. I won’t live as long as my dad, and I don’t even have a guess how long he’ll live.
My dad was abandoned as a baby. He was left at a bakery where my paternal grandmother worked. A lot of his siblings were adopted too.
My dad went through some pretty crazy things. I can count the number of times I’ve almost died, a couple before getting shot and few in the hospital. He served in Vietnam, but even before that his mother was schizophrenic and deeply religious. There were a few stories of her trying to kill him because she thought he was possessed by the devil. She also saved his life once, or so the story is told, when she killed a rattlesnake, cut off it’s head, and threw it in a creek. (Apparently the loggers in the camp wouldn’t go near the creek anymore because they were afraid of the snake head or some such superstition.)
I realized later that it’s not just that I don’t know how long I’ll have with her. I see how things are. I know there could come a time when she has to leave me behind, when she has to save herself. I will keep getting older. I don’t want her to get stuck trying to save me and miss an opportunity to save herself.
My dad couldn’t leave the US. The Empire broke him to prevent the threat of a good example. Now he survives off the crumbs they let fall to vets like him. As they dismantle everything, how long will that last? The US will be a death sentence for a lot of people.
Sadness. Grief, loss, sadness, sadness…
There will come a time when I’m too old to move, to leave, to support myself, to save myself, as the polycrisis continues to evolve. I want my oldest, no matter how much she loves me, to be able to leave me behind. I want her to be able leave me behind because I love her. I want her to be able to leave me behind like I left my dad.
Near Death (2025.10.10)
I have a shoe box full of cards from all over the world. If you wrote to me while I was in the hospital, I still have your letter. I read each of them. They were all really wonderful. I’m sorry I didn’t write back. I was a little distracted at the time. Perhaps I still am. Consider this the thank you I never sent.
When I came down from intensive care the first time, I remember the cards and letters being all set up in my room. There were some flowers. There was also a giant card signed by a bunch of local comrades. I still have that somewhere too. I’ve considered donating it to the labor history department of UW as a thank you to Anna Mari, with a few of the pictures we took for her in the hospital later.
One of the cards has one corners is cut off, but all the rest are as they were when I opened them.
The days in the hospital all blurred together. At the beginning it was easy to keep things clear. I was in the OR. My partner came to see me as soon as I could be seen. I think I was in Intensive Care for about a week. My tattoo was pretty well stapled together. I was impressed. Everyone thought I was healing really well. I do tend to heal well. My tattoo artist, the one who did the chest piece that got the bullet hole and all cut up in surgery, had said at one point while working on it, “you heal like Wolverine.” I do heal pretty quickly.
So after that first week or so, when they told me I would probably go home soon, I was a little surprised but not incredulous.
I came into that room full of cards, flowers, my loving partner, friends. I was hopeful, that first time out of the IC. We all were. We read the cards together. Everything was pretty good. But I did have a pain in my lower abdomen. I asked for a heat pack or something, and they brought me one. My partner and friends had left the room for a little bit. I don’t remember the details. A nurse, I believe, came in and talked to me a bit. I mentioned the pain and she smelled my wound, then told me they were going to take me to imaging. After she flagged folks down she said something along the lines of, “No, take him straight to the OR.”
The pain got worse and everything became a blur. I remember leaving the room, but I don’t remember what happened next. My partner filled me in later.
In that box there’s also a note that I wrote. I think it was about the first night. They always keep you in the IC after that type of surgery, as I understand it. Being so badly injured, time really blurred. I was asleep, then awake, it was day then night. They came in every few hours to check on me, take blood, change my fluids. Every day or two they pulled my IV and gave me new one. Every few hours, I’d sleep for a bit and someone would come in, poke me a bunch of times, then go. Sometimes they’d move me around and change the sheets.
I remember it being dark, but honestly I have no idea. I wasn’t fully awake at the beginning. I don’t remember much very clearly at all, except the quiet and then the screaming, then the heavy sound of the zipper. It felt like she was crying for hours. The screams of agony, of despair, are not something you can describe. They started loud, loud enough to keep me fully awake, loud enough she must have lost her voice the next day.
It can’t have been an expected death. Perhaps a parent dying early, perhaps a partner, or a child. Everything in her screamed at that first moment in response to the soft mumbling voice down the hall. Over time her screams became an exhausted whimper.
I heard another voice. “Yes. Yes.”
There was the juxtaposition between the business of death – this happened, that happened, sign here, what arrangements need to be made for the body – and the emotional experience of it. I imagined it to be a relative, perhaps a sister, taking care of this business and occasionally comforting her sibling. When the business was done there was some walking around, but the crying, slowly becoming quieter, stayed in the same place. The light came on so I could hit the button for more pain killers. In the first few days after surgeries, the pain was always right there. I hit the button and fell slowly back asleep. I think this was my first night in the hospital, so it was almost a week until I would spend my brief time back in the general care area.
When my partner came back to the room I’d just been rapidly evacuated from, they were already cleaning it. All the cards had been thrown into a biohazard bag. She was barely able to save them. There was an orange liquid coming out of one of the tubes in my body. We later talked about how my partner had to empty my guava juice pouch every day for some time after I got out of the hospital. One of the cards had been thrown on some gauze or something with some of this orange liquid and had soaked some up into the corner. She cut it off. The others were fine.
There was a carelessness and callousness to the business of the hospital. The room was empty, so it was cleaned for the next person. The humanity of the situation was irrelevant to maximizing the efficiency of bed usage. Capitalism does this too us all the time, but there are few times it feels so intensely visceral.
We weren’t married at the time, and I was under a protective order because of all the death threats I’d been getting, so they wouldn’t tell my partner where I was. She just came in and I was gone. I don’t remember what they told her but I had to ask for her to be informed.
She told me that she screamed, and may have punched a hole in a wall.
I didn’t die that time. In the following few weeks there were several times I didn’t die. When I came back my wound was open.
There was another surgery where they gave me ketamine and little to no pain killers. so I woke up hallucinating that I was crevice, that I had been sliced up and was having lemon poured over the pieces of my body – all of which I could still feel. The tube was still down my throat, so I couldn’t scream. I thought I was convinced I was being kidnaped as I came back. I signed into my mother-in-law’s hand as best as I could remember, “help me.”
I think that surgery was from the other time I almost died, when my vision went orange and I collapsed onto the hospital floor. I tried to scream for help, but could only whisper, as I slowly bled out inside my body.
I would have never heard the screaming from my partner, but I know what it would sound like. Through all the craziness and chaos, those moments still come to me. I can’t quite place the room. It’s almost as if I remember myself floating in a void surrounded by those operating room curtains. I can remember, if I think on it a moment, the plastic grinding of the infuser. I remember beeping, but I don’t remember if it was the EKG or if I’m just remembering the default hospital sound from a show or a movie. So much is blurry, far away, chaotic and confusing. The commotion is still amorphous, dreamlike. But the quiet, the screaming, the zipper, that all remains crystal clear.
This was the first reminder of where I actually was. I imagined myself in a place where people recover, where people heal. But this was also a place where people die. Recovery is not linear. I would be reminded of this many more times in the following few weeks, and year. All of the interventions, the x-rays, the plastic in my body, these were all dangerous. I’m still wary to take ibuprofen because of the strain on my kidneys and liver. Each intervention was weighed against my risk of immediate death. Each one could carve years off my life.
These treatments, these interventions, they would never leave me the person I was before. Trauma like mine doesn’t work like that. Trauma always takes some of your life. Sometimes it ends your life right there, other times you can heal and have a long life before you fall into the hole left by those missing years.
Part of me has never left that place, floating in that curtained void, where I was both healing and near death.
About the Author
Hex is an anarchist, hacker and parent who happens to have the unusual distinction of being the first protester shot in the US under the Trump administration. Now living in the Netherlands with his partner and two young children, he has returned to writing as a form of therapy and as a tool to build a better future.