To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.His very last words were, "Thank you, and I love you, and enough." We know all this because his daughter, Lisa Smartt, a linguist, copied down his words and wrote a book.
I'm reading "What People Actually Say Before They Die/Insights into the little-studied realm of last words" by Michael Erard (The Atlantic).
From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.” Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in a September essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”...Well, that sort of effort to get home and being on a journey without a map is the storyline of nearly every dream I can remember, so I don't think that's special to the dying process. And when you're on a powerful opiate, you're drifting into dreams all the time.
In Final Gifts, the hospice nurses Callanan and Kelley note that “the dying often use the metaphor of travel to alert those around them that it is time for them to die.” They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!” Smartt noted such journey metaphors as well, though she writes that dying people seem to get more metaphorical in general....
Despite the faults of Smartt’s book (it doesn’t control for things such as medication, for one thing, and it’s colored by an interest in the afterlife)....
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40 comments:
You can’t top “Rosebud.”
Mort Felix, "And make sure you get a refund on my unused Atlantic subscription."
Didn't see the word God or pray in this blog about facing death- hostess is a pure cultural marxist
We may die thinking of lost maps, but our children will die thinking they can't get cell phone coverage.
I have found it very hard to understand the dying.
A dry mouth and morphine does not lead to clear diction. The listener fills in the gaps as they see fit.
I was caregiver for a dying Army officer who had spent a lot of time in the South Pacific during part of WWII. He was getting morphine. One day he said, "There's a ship in the harbor, and it's full of booze!"
His kids said he probably had more fun on Espiritu Santu than he ever did at home.
Dutch Schultz, the NYC gangster, also turned out to be pretty poetic as he lay dying in 1935, providing some literary inspiration to William Burroughs.
"You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.
Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn't get snappy"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Schultz#Last_words_and_posthumous_events
The horror! The horror!
My mother, who passed away this past December at the age of 99 yrs, 7 mos and 11 days, said two things, other than answering questions from the doctors and nurses - what's your name, when's your birthday, where are you, who I was, etc., which she answered correctly - hold my hand, which in all the times I had taken her to the hospital she never said, and, as the nurses poked and prodded her, put me in the car.
She was ready to go.
I feel that what people say in their final moments is generally intensely private. I feel that this is a form of voyeurism.
I feel that what people say in their final moments is generally intensely private. I feel that this is a form of voyeurism.
Morphine has to have a lot to do with it.
My Dad is starting to get lost in the medicine, the clear thinking ultra-planner is in and out now that hospice has taken over and time is short.
The cancer has metastasized in his brain and its part anything beyond last ditch efforts for a few more weeks in a hospital bed.
As his sight is mostly gone and hearing going, I am thankful for his clear planning and decisions regarding end of life. Death sucks, but I am thankful he is letting go now vs lingering for months uncommunicative in a hospital bed. No one benefits from that except the medical industry.
If I am there where he goes, no one is going to be publishing those words.
My Dad, who saw a lot of sailors die during WW 2 - Battle of Pearl Harbor, Savo Island, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and first ship to rescue USS Indianapolis survivors - said that the young men almost invariably asked for their Mothers.
As Gen X starts passing away, I suspect we'll start hearing a lot of deathbed Simpsons references.
I hope I die in my sleep like my grandpa, and not yelling and screaming like the other people in his car.
Aunt Belle, I didn't mean to do it. Please say it don't make any difference,Aunt Belle. Please you gotta say it. You gotta tell me, it don't make any difference.
“Hey fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French fries.'” — James French, before his execution
I don't know - if I think hard enough about it, I would probably want to be lucid enough right up to the end to be able to say "I wish I had spent more time at the office". From what I hear, no one has ever said that.
"Oh shit." Cockpit voice recorders.
I always liked Louisa May Alcott's description of Beth's death; it seemed very realistic to me (a person who had never sat at a deathbed then). Quoting from memory - "no farewell but one loving look, one little sigh."
“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” - Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson
My mother and her sister were attending the death of their aunt, who said "Oh, hurry up, girls, it's beautiful over here!"
I expect a surge of "Fuck Trump"
I don't know what my father's final words were- we were in and out of the room during his last day of consciousness. I only know his final words to me.
Peter de Vries suggested agreeing on your final words with a loved one, and that's the story that goes out. You may not be in good shape later.
Thoreau : "Moose." Then "Indians."
Einstein's were in German, and the nurse there didn't speak German.
"Ich weiß, wie man die Quantenmechanik mit der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie vereinheitlicht."
I can't find it right now, but there is a great TED talk about this by a foreign-born physician; I'm remembering a Germanic accent. The point of the talk is to communicate from his experience and studies some reassurance about the process of the last days (not focused on religion/afterlife). He describes first how most people don't die in a single "boom," and then then talks about the most typical type of decline. With proper care it is often not a terrible time and many of the patients and family experience a lot of meaning. Finally he talks a lot about so many (the majority) begin to have visions and dreams of the journey to come, and many are quite lucid that they are seeing their loved ones in the room. There's also a common phenomenon of seeing something like angels up towards the ceilings. My father-in-law was talking to his mother the day before he died, and my mother-in-law was completely fascinated with *something* going on up at the ceiling two days before she passed.
(eaglebeak)
Rather than the somewhat prosaic notion that the last words about trips and journeys have no special relation to death, perhaps we might think that all our dreams, or many of our dreams, are rehearsals for death.
When my mother was dying, she seemed to want to leave but was worried about how I would take it. Her last words were: "Don't be afraid."
Thank you for posting this, Ann.
I have never been present when someone died, but reading these stories makes it easy to see why churches teach that there is a beautiful future after death. The dying tell us so.
My pastor was in the hospital room as a man died describing something other than angels. He was in fear and describing overwhelming heat. So seeing a beautiful future is not universal.
We can't know what the dying actually see but apparently some see heaven and some see hell. Who are we to say they are wrong?
He may have been an atheist during life, but the only way to see angels is to have been baptized into the Holy Spirit. Some people probably go straight to Heaven; the rest of us need to remember to store up our riches in heaven, not on earth, where mold and rust corrupt, and where thieves break in. If you always store your riches in heaven, like Ann does every day here, it gives us something truly sweet to remember and this helps.
Sarah who was my mother, and I know she is in Heaven.
"I'm not getting any better, am I?" my mother said last.
My dear wife died, of cancer, sixteen months ago. The cancer was advanced when it was found. She lived for not quite four months after the diagnosis. She spent her last week in hospice, mostly unconscious.
I never quite realized how advanced the cancer was. I was shocked when I was told by the hospice people that she had passed. I was home at the time, preparing the house for the visit of a relative who was flying in long distance to see her one last time. I had spent the previous at the hospice, sleeping next to her and holding her hand. She was not responsive at that point.
I never asked the details of how advanced the cancer was. I didn't want to write her off. The initial diagnosis said that she had six months, not fifteen weeks. Since then I have learned more about the dying process, the clues were clear and obvious, if I had been able to see them. No appetite. No hunger at all. She was mostly normal, we could carry on long conversations, and then I would discover that she thought she was in a room at our house, not a room in the hospital. She began to get morning and evening confused. She hallucinated that there were animals, pets, in the hospital room and hallways. Dogs, cats, and birds.
Before she slipped into unconsciousness for the last time, she held my hand and said "I love you, I love you, I love you" three times, just like that.
Lewis, I am truly sorry for your loss. I would hope to have the chance to have my last words be the same as those given by your beloved wife.
@Lewis Wetzel, please accept my sympathy.
James Thurber (death): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Thurber
"Thurber's behavior became erratic and unpredictable in his last year. At a party hosted by Noël Coward, Thurber was taken back to the Algonquin Hotel at six in the morning. Thurber was stricken with a blood clot on the brain on October 4, 1961, and underwent emergency surgery, drifting in and out of consciousness. The operation was initially successful, but Thurber died a few weeks later, on November 2, aged 66, due to complications from pneumonia. The doctors said his brain was senescent from several small strokes and hardening of the arteries. His last words, aside from the repeated word "God", were "God bless... God damn", according to his wife, Helen."
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