The coroner’s inquest, conducted in the days following her death, reached a finding of accidental death. The coroner determined that the cause was an “incautious self-overdosage” of barbiturates — that she had taken more of the sleeping medication than was safe, and that this had caused her death. The finding specifically excluded suicide: the coroner stated that no evidence suggested the overdose was intentional. The death certificate recorded the cause of death as an accidental overdose.
A British forensic specialist who examined her body made statements about cirrhosis of the liver, suggesting that her health had been seriously compromised by years of alcohol and pharmaceutical use. A subsequent examination did not confirm cirrhosis. The accounts of her health in the final years are consistent with the conclusion that decades of pharmaceutical dependency had taken a cumulative toll on her physical condition.
The news of her death arrived in the middle of New York’s early summer, and the response was of the kind that registered as cultural rather than merely the celebrity media cycle. The crowd at the funeral home where her body was brought for public viewing was reported at around twenty thousand people over two days. She was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Her daughter Liza Minnelli, who was twenty-three at the time of her mother’s death, told Time magazine in 1972: “She didn’t die from an overdose. I think she just got tired.”
The medical record establishes the cause as barbiturate overdose. Her daughter’s statement is a daughter’s way of understanding what the numbers and the inquest cannot fully explain — the accumulated cost of a life lived at the intensity that Garland had lived hers.