Parting Shots

O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony:
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
He that no more must say is listen'd more
Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose;
More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before:
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past.

Shakespeare, Richard the 2^nd Act II, Scene 1

The Bard said it far more eloquently than we could ever dream of doing, but here's the theory: the words of the dying, especially those words that are preserved for the benefit of posterity, are usually assumed to have been chosen ones, rather than errant ramblings. At the same time, such utterances tend to be short, suggesting that little must stand for much. So we took it in our minds to study a few last words with the aid of the Visual Thesaurus to see if the wordmaps illuminated some of the backstory of the messages left us by those about to go over to the other side.

The very notion (or hope, or doubt, or faith, or wish) that there is another side is probably one factor that has set dying tongues a-wagging ever since the first caveperson bought the farm. Indeed, purveyors of religion might find themselves with very little to do if there weren't a considerable willingness to invest in the idea of there being some sort of coming attraction, so we might look to the purveyors of religion as a place to start our investigation. Henry Ward Beecher, a preacher and brother to the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was undoubtedly right on the money when he said, just before slipping away: "Now comes the mystery." Hard to imagine a better choice of words here, as nearly every sense of mystery applies in this case: whodunit, mystery story, closed book, enigma, secret. We respect him for, even at the 11^th hour, not having insisted that what happened next was altogether clear.

Not all of the moribund apprehend the life to come with such uncertainty. Take, for example, poet Emily Dickinson, whose final words were: “the fog is rising.” Fog seems pretty, uh, clear — that is, it seems likely that she was referring to the “daze-haze” nexus of the word (“confusion characterized by lack of clarity”). We'd like to think that she meant the fog was dissipating, so as to reveal what had been obscured before, but when we look at all the possibilities that rising presents, it's hard to say what she meant. She lived most of the latter part of her life in near seclusion, hardly leaving her house, and the subjects she took up in her poetry certainly give her credentials for the label “mystic.” It seems likely that something was coming into focus in those last moments, though we can only speculate what.

Staying with poets for a moment — it seems reasonable to expect them to be articulate, even at death's door — we have always been much impressed by the last words of English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. He led a rather short and by all accounts not terribly happy life, including one period when he feared that his prayers no longer reached God, prompting him to write what are called the "terrible" sonnets. Yet as he lay dying of typhoid fever in 1889, he spoke thus: "I am happy, so happy." Happy, as we can see, is a much more nuanced word than you might expect without studying its wordmap, but the great thing about it is that, of all its many senses, there's not a one that would be found objectionable as one lay in extremis. Hopkins' dying words are the sort that, if we were lying in the next deathbed over, would prompt us to say, “I'll have what he's having.” It seems reasonable to assume that Hopkins' Christian faith informed his final expectations to some degree, but again, no record is left us of what came next.

Our award for the meatiest and most well thought-out last words last words goes, hands down, to the Buddha Gautama. He could, at not too great a stretch, be described as an itinerant preacher — as a way of getting back to our starting theme. Unfortunately for us, the Buddha breathed his last long before English was even a glimmer in the eye of those delightful British Islanders, so we have to resort to translation to get a handle on what he meant. According to Buddhist scriptures the Buddha was aware that he was dying, and gave this parting advice to his disciples: “All the constituents of being are transitory. Work out your salvation with diligence.”

Quite a lot of material — and not a great deal of comfort — in that take-home message! In the first part, transitory in particular doesn't seem to leave much wiggle room: ephemeral, fugacious, passing, short-lived, transient. The other parts of the sentence — all, constituent, and being — leave curiously few loopholes for those seeking something in the way of comfort, let alone anything truly lasting. The second part of the message, however — and it seems to us like it should be preceded by a therefore — seems to hold out some promise: “work out your salvation with diligence.” Hmm: “preserving from harm or unpleasantness”? You mean that's actually possible in light of what he said before? The words certainly invite one to investigate, perhaps diligently, just how that salvation might be effected, and thus they serve as a very fitting coda to what the Buddha advocated throughout his ministry: namely, getting with his program, which promised an eventual exit from this recurring vale of tears.

We've hardly scratched the surface of what's to be found lurking behind various last utterances (and we wish we could call them teleologisms, except that that word already has a different meaning). As long as you've got the VT open, why not try unpack a few of your favorites?

If you feel like going in at the deep end, here's a link to a group of dying men whose tongues do indeed enforce attention: all those who have been executed by the state of Texas in the last many years, and had their final statements preserved for our edification:

http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/executedoffenders.htm

For less jolting fare, here are links connected with the deaths of two of our featured personages. First, an obituary of Emily Dickinson, written by her sister:

http://www.emilydickinson.org/susan/tedobit1.html

(and the several pages following, linked to from the first page)

And finally, an account of the death of the Buddha, in the official version:

http://www.bartleby.com/45/3/106.html

and the elevator talk version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautama_Buddha#The_Great_Passing