The people who interacted with him remembered specific details: the television on a blank channel, the warnings about “them,” the disappearances. These were the things that had struck them as unusual enough to be memorable. The ordinary days — the work performed, the technical problems solved, the routine tasks completed — were not the substance of what they carried forward from the years they had known him.
The 1989 hospital visit, documented in his records and attributed to an injury from a vacuum cleaner, has been noted in multiple sources. The specificity of the attribution — not a vague “household accident” but the particular claim of a vacuum cleaner — has attracted some comment, as has the bare fact of an injury that required hospitalization. Whether the vacuum cleaner explanation was true, or whether it was an explanation offered to avoid inquiry into some other cause of the injuries, is not established.
After the layoff from Lubrizol in 1997, Nichols’s contact with the people who had known him as Chandler presumably attenuated. He was no longer in the workplace. He was an elderly man living alone in an Eastlake apartment, apparently ill with cancer, spending his last years in the extreme isolation that had characterized his entire Ohio existence.
The calendar marks — the countdown to the date he had chosen for his death — are evidence of a mind that planned with precision even at the end. He had organized his departure from life the way he had organized his life itself: deliberately, systematically, on a schedule of his own choosing. He would not be found alive; he had made certain arrangements to ensure that.