The real loss, the thought of his wife leaving him after all that time spent on his job to make her happy as the measuring stick of his success in life ultimately turning into losing his leg in his mind as his brain kept failing was the final stab. After that, he had nothing left to hold on to while the rest of the guilts still left in the gathered form of Mandingo kept stabbing and cutting away at the rest of his sense of self.
I had thought in the first part of this ongoing commentary (I think this is part 4 now) that it was like George was emotionally eviscerating himself out of guilt with a real bowel evac and puncture as part of a vivid backdrop, not yet knowing the depths of this story. Going back over the entire story again and again keeps peeling back layers of encrypted enculturation that somehow haunted his entire working life. We begin to see his complicity, however passive, in the enculturation of ignorance as a rationale for his entire way of life. His son got it, while adults all around him missed it. His brother got it and easily diagnosed the root of the problem. His wife, left out of George's emotional shutdown loop, might have been mortified to think she was the justification for his wilful ignorance of financial consequences, but we never get to find that out.
When we hear the Have No Fear theme arrive with Jenny to find George staring into the pool, we see George at his lowest point before the procedure the next day. At this point, a person could wonder if all the rest is a complete fiction and what we see in the movie is his hell of spiritual self flagellation while he's actually drowning in the pool, justifying that the colonoscopy would have killed him anyway.
This movie was that layered and that weird. It's my 5th viewing and I'm still pulling it all apart. Notice I didn't even start on Zoe. She was the most fictional of all, and the one he hung onto right up to the end.
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