'Keeping Away the Thoughts of It"

I’ve always assumed that all writing, even a grocery list, is at some level autobiographical. The “life-writing” may be latent, buried or disguised. It may be fictionalized, abstracted and unintentional, and what close reading reveals is trivial. But like DNA, words are uniquely eloquent. 

Most of us assume we know the meaning of death, at least as defined by the absence of its apparent opposite: the cessation of life. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson gives tendefinitions of the word, the first the most commonplace for his time: “The extinction of life; the departure of the soul from the body.” The first phrase we might call biological; the second, orthodox. The first of his four citations is Hebrews 9:5. Two from Shakespeare follow, and one from Dryden.

 

More than most of us, death preoccupied Johnson. Boswell asked, “But is not the fear of death natural to man?” Johnson replied, “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.” He feared dying in sin, without redemption. Trace his fears across the subsequent definitions. The second: “mortality; destruction.” The fifth: “the image of mortality represented by a skeleton.” The eighth: “destroyer.” The tenth: “damnation; eternal torments.”

 

On December 13, 1784, Boswell tells us Johnson was visited by “a Miss Morris, daughter to a particular friend of his.” Her identity remains a mystery. Johnson’s last days mingled the grotesque and the noble. He suffered from general circulatory disease, made evident six months earlier by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, accompanied by growing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. In Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998), Lawrence Lipking describes the scene shortly before his death:

 

“Bloated with dropsy [edema], Johnson tries to discharge the water by stabbing his legs with a lancet and scissors until the bedclothes are covered with blood. He even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.”

 

Miss Morris told Frank Barber, Johnson’s servant, that she must see him. “[T]he girl, too anxious to wait outside in case he came out with a refusal,” John Wain tells us in his biography (1974), “”followed at his heels and stood there while Frank explained what she wanted. Johnson’s almost helpless body turned over in the bed; he looked at her and spoke, ‘God bless you, my dear.’ They were his last words.

 

“At about seven o’clock that evening, Frank and Elizabeth Desmoulins were sitting in Johnson’s room when his breathing ceased, quietly and with no disturbance. It was some minutes before they realized that he had died.”