death
The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
“Compensation,” in The Spritual Emerson (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 130.
When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.
Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, dated August 15, 1957, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 225.
I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.
The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2001), 201.
My friend was irreplaceable, and her death left a jagged hole I will spend the rest of my life tiptoeing around the edges of. Writing about her loss—to her husband, now a widower, and her mother—was an opportunity to play geographer, and draw a map of the contours of our shared sorrow.
“The Lost Art of the Condolence Letter,” New York Times, February 10, 2014.
Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.
About her husband, Lou Reed, published in the East Hampton Star, October 31, 2013. Full obit here.
Don’t be afraid.
His last words (texted to his wife in Latin from his hospital bed minutes before he died), “How So Many People Got Seamus Heaney’s Last Words Wrong,” by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, September 4, 2013.
It may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was ninety-two does not diminish—it only magnifies—the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.
Stephen Colbert’s tribute to his mother, Lorna Tuck Colbert, on The Colbert Report, June 19, 2013.
Members of some ancient tribe or other had the custom of placing either a black or a white pebble into a jar at the end of every day, depending on whether the day had been bad or good. A sensible custom. At the end of someone’s life his jar was turned upside down and it could then be seen if it had been a happy or unhappy life. Instead of that stone ritual, I could write in this exercise book at the end of every day: life is beautiful, or miserable, or difficult, or delightful, or whatever. I’ll do that for a whole month. Very curious to see how it will turn out.
Thursday, August 7, 1941 entry, in Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum: 1941–1943 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 78.
An individual human existence should be like a river—small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwelcome. The wise man should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what he can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
Bertrand Russell, “The Happy Man,” in New Hopes for a Changing World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), 205.
And they saw hope pass by in a train.
Description of mourners lined up along the railroad tracks, as the train carrying RFK traveled from New York City to Washington, in “April 23, 1969: R.F.K. Assassin Sirhan Sirhan Sentenced to Death,” April 23, 2012.
I go to seek a great perhaps.
Last words, in Rabelais (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905), xxi.
One day when I got home at Fourteen Wright Street, Judy opened the door and looked so stricken that I said, “Judy, what’s happened? Has Tom Jones died?” That was our cat. She said, “No, but Volta Hall has had a heart attack and died.” I suppose this is one of the most terrifying blows life has to offer: when your psychiatrist disappears. Within the next two days I wrote an elegy for Volta Hall which is in the Collected Poems and in which the repeated line is, “Now the long lucid listening is done.” I sent this to his widow with a bunch of violets. There was no reply. I thought perhaps there is an unwritten rule that the wife of a psychiatrist does not make contact with a patient even after he himself has died. So I thought no more about it. About ten years later I had a note from her asking if she could come to see me. She came and told me that I would never know what that poem had meant, that she could give it to her children so they could see what her husband and their father had been for so many patients and what he was in himself. She also came—and this touched me deeply—to ask my blessing on her remarriage, as though I was speaking, in a way, for Volta. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that’s what he would want.’
You never know, when you send out a bird with an olive branch in its beak, whether it will come back or not.
Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 130–31.