AS HE lay slumped beside his 11 fellow miners, their crude shelter thick with carbon monoxide and knowing that his death was near, Martin Toler Jr took an insurance form and pen from his pocket and scrawled a farewell note to his beloved family.

In a wobbly hand, as he drifted towards a sleep from which he knew he would never awake, Mr Toler wrote: “Tell all — I see them on the other side.”

And then, to the right of this farewell, he managed a few more words that have brought a first small measure of comfort for the West Virginia community devastated by this week’s mining tragedy: “It wasn’t bad, I just went to sleep.”

The 51-year-old foreman, one of twelve miners killed after being trapped deep underground by an early morning explosion on Monday, then simply signed off: “I love you.” The discovery of Mr Toler’s note, and at least four others found in the miners’ clothing, offered extraordinary succour to the men’s families.

They were allowed to believe for three hours on Tuesday that 12 of the 13 miners involved in the disaster had been found alive, before being told that in fact 12 were dead. Tom Toler, Mr Toler’s older brother who worked for 30 years in the Sago mine with him, said that the note had been written “very lightly and very loosely” on the back of an insurance application form.

“I took it to mean that it was written in the final stages,” he said. “I’d call it more or less a scribbling.”

He said that his brother, a father and grandfather, had been a very religious man, and that he had probably seen several members of his crew “go to sleep” before he wrote the note. He added: “I knew he would have left a note. It was heart-wrenching, but I was glad to get it.”

It was unclear last night which of the other dead men also wrote notes, but there was speculation that Mr Toler, as their foreman, was perhaps the only man to have been carrying a pen — raising speculation that they passed it from one man to the next.

Randy Toler, the dead miner’s nephew, said that the note “has become possibly the most precious possession our family has”.

Peggy Cohen, whose father, Fred Ware, 59, died, said that no note had been found on his body, but when she and other families went to the morgue to identify their relatives, the medical examiner told her that others had left notes, all with the same message.

“The notes said they weren’t suffering, they were just going to sleep,” Mrs Cohen said. She added that her father had a peaceful look, and that the only mark on his body was a bruise on his chest. “It comforts me to know he didn’t suffer,” she said. “I didn’t need a note. I think I needed to visualise him and see him.”

The lone survivor, 26-year-old Randal McCloy Jr, was in a stable but critical condition as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning, his doctors said.

Dr Richard Shannon, in charge of the miner’s treatment at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, said he had undergone hyperbaric oxygen treatment, which bombards the body with oxygen.

He said that Mr McCloy, married with a son, 4, and a one-year-old daughter, was not in a coma. It was too early to determine what, if any, brain damage he had suffered.

It emerged yesterday that 12 of the 13 miners survived the initial blast and had crawled to the farthest end of the 13,000ft (3,962m) shaft to try to escape the poisonous air. Mr McCloy, and his 11 dead colleagues, were discovered behind a curtain-like barrier set up to keep out carbon monoxide. Each miner had breathing apparatus that provided an hour’s worth of oxygen.

DIGNITY IN EXTREMIS: THE LAST GOODBYES

Moments before the United Airlines flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, passengers made tearful farewells to their loved ones on mobile phones, their conversations revealing their bravery and self-sacrifice. One passenger told his wife before the line went dead: “I know we’re all going to die — there’s three of us who are going to do something about it . . . I love you, hon.”

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