I'm tired. Sometimes I sleep for days at a time and can't remember much of anything. Other times I lie awake, seemingly for days on end, and remember everything.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about last words. There’ve been some good ones down through the ages. I don’t expect mine, whatever it may be, to be carried into the history books.
Still, I’m thinking about last words and looking for some inspiration. Help me out.
If memory serves me appropriately, it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Maybe that’s why there are so many CSI shows on TV and so few situation comedies worth watching.
Dylan Thomas supposedly said, “I just had eighteen straight scotches. I think that’s the record…After thirty-nine years, this is all I’ve done.”
Of course, his view of his own talent may have been distorted by the scotch, and certainly so on more than one occasion.
It was pop singer Sam Cooke who reportedly said, “Lady, you shot me!” It isn’t often that crime, judge, jury and executioner all show up at once. Still, Sam summed up the situation quite well.
US President Ulysses S. Grant, considered by some to be a brilliant general of the civil war, by most others merely a well-known alcoholic has, as his last recorded words, “Water!”
That seems oddly appropriate.
“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded...” were the last words of Terry Kath of Chicago Transit Authority. He was cleaning a gun without a magazine and pulled the trigger. There was still one bullet in the chamber.
Famous last words are different than an epitaph on a head stone. “I told you I was sick!’ has always been a favorite.
I haven’t decided whether I should do my personal “famous last words” and then just shut up until it’s over, or merely leave an epitaph buried somewhere in my will. Or both.
Modern medicine being what it is I may have to remain silent for much longer than I ever have in the past, though much to the relief of a few and former friends.
There’s another kind of Famous Last Words—those words uttered or written which turn out to be ever so wrong, and very shortsighted.
One of the Warner brothers of the film studio Warner Brothers, reportedly uttered, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
Never say never.
Irving Fisher, a professor of economics at Yale reportedly said, “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” That was in 1929 just before the stock market crash.
Never say never.
Maybe that’s what I should say.
NOTE:
I talked briedly with Tera on the phone today and transcribed the above so readers would know she’s still around, still thinking; though she sleeps a lot these days.
—Alexis Kayhill
I’ve been working on my own epitaph since I discovered such things in elementary school. Here I am now, closer to dusk than to dawn, and I still haven’t found one that suits me.
“Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.” comes not from G. B. Shaw, but English stage actor Edmund Gwenn, one of Shaw’s discoveries. You know Edmund Gwenn. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street.
I think the most frustrating things about my dying will be knowing that I’m leaving other good people, family and friends, to shoulder burdens without my help AND never knowing what Next Great Thing (NGT) is coming. I don’t just mean what the PowerMac replacement will be. I mean, what NGT—like video game console, personal computer, cell phone—is right around the corner that I just missed because I couldn’t quite live long enough to see it. Damn!
Hugs,
... JJ