![]() ![]() Bush, whose last words (“I love you, too,” he reportedly told his son, George W. I spoke to Maureen Keeley shortly after the death of George H. “Even when people are too weak to speak, or have lost consciousness, they can hear hearing is the last sense to fade.” “As the person gets weaker and sleepier, communication with others often becomes more subtle,” Callanan and Kelley write. Previous centuries’ focus on last words has ceded space to the contemporary focus on last conversations and even nonverbal interactions. Books such as Final Gifts, published in 1992 by the hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, and Final Conversations, published in 2007 by Maureen Keeley, a Texas State University communications-studies scholar, and Julie Yingling, professor emerita at Humboldt State University, aim to sharpen the skills of the living for having important, meaningful conversations with the dying. Some contemporary approaches move beyond the oratorical monologues of yore and focus on emotions and relationships. One point that Guthke makes repeatedly is that last words, as anthologized in multiple languages since the 17th century, are artifacts of an era’s concerns and fascinations about death, not “historical facts of documentary status.” They can tell us little about a dying person’s actual ability to communicate. Mainly, MacDonald’s work shows that we need better data about verbal and nonverbal abilities at the end of life. MacDonald’s work “seems to be the only attempt to evaluate last words by quantifying them, and the results are curious,” wrote the German scholar Karl Guthke in his book Last Words, on Western culture’s long fascination with them. ![]() MacDonald found that military men had the “relatively highest number of requests, directions, or admonitions,” while philosophers (who included mathematicians and educators) had the most “questions, answers, and exclamations.” The religious and royalty used the most words to express contentment or discontentment, while the artists and scientists used the fewest. To assess people’s “mental condition just before death,” MacDonald mined last-word anthologies, the only linguistic corpus then available, dividing people into 10 occupational categories (statesmen, philosophers, poets, etc.) and coding their last words as sarcastic, jocose, contented, and so forth. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald. I knew about collections of “last words,” eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of the dying. Read more: What it’s like to learn you’re going to dieĭespite the limitations of this book, it’s unique-it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. ![]() Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. “I’ve lost my modality.” 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.įelix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.ĭuring those three weeks, Felix had talked. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. ![]() Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. ![]()
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