Had I been more clever or alert I might have heard and recorded my brother’s last words before he died last August in hospice. A reader asks about this, and I admit I blew it. For the last week or so of his life, Ken was unconscious, occasionally moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed.
It’s customary to focus on last words. Perhaps we expect wisdom, reassurance, a lifetime’s lesson pithily expressed. There is precedent. William Hazlitt, not the happiest of men, is reported to have said while dying, “Well, I've had a happy life.” Assuming its accuracy, I find that enormously touching. And there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, dying of typhoid fever: “I am so happy, so happy.” Delusion or gratitude? I prefer to avoid the cynical interpretation.
I’ve
just finished reading Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la
Mare (Duckworth, 1993) by Theresa Whistler. I’ve grown deeply interested in
de la Mare and his work in the last several years. The poet would die on June
22, 1956 at age eighty-three. He had been ailing for several years. On the evening of
June 21, Whistler reports de la Mare told his nurse: “Oh, N [Sister Natalie
Saxton], I do feel seedy!” To the end, interesting word choice. He had suffered
another coronary thrombosis, was given oxygen and repeatedly pulled off the
mask. He slept intermittently. Sir Russell Brain, the eminent neurologist and
close friend of de la Mare, visited. “He was bright, even happy,” Whistler
writes, “and joked: ‘I think we shall cheat them yet.’”
To
a pretty nurse, de la Mare said, “It’s a long time since we met – you must have
come out of a dream.” With prompting, de la Mare recited his poem “Fare Well.”
Whistler writes:
“The
longest day drew in quietly, and the short night fell. N had gone out of the
room for a brief rest. The nurse who had taken her place tucked him in – it was
2 a.m. – and bent over him. She asked if he was quite comfortable. ‘Yes, I’m
perfectly all right,’ he answered – then he caught his breath in one gasp and
died. There was no time to fetch N or the others. The nurse could only wake
them and tell them he was gone.”
3 comments:
I'm reminded of Lytton Strachey's (1880-1932) last words as he lay dying of stomach cancer in January, 1932: "If this is dying, I don't think much of it." He was 51.
Randall Jarrell's poem "The Boyg, Peer Gynt, The One Only One" begins "'Well, I have had a happy life,' said Hazlitt/Swift's eye was as big as an egg".
Civil War general Adelbert Ames: "Oh, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist -" the last word cut short by a bullet passing through his brain.
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