Editor's note: Professor Richard Bailey, Michigan Today's "Talking About Words" columnist and a longtime and beloved teacher of English, passed away on April 2. We will miss him; his wit, curiosity and intelligence were mainstays not just of this publication, but of U-M and Ann Arbor. He wrote this final column not long before his death. http://michigantoday.umich.edu/2011/04/story.php?id=7967&tr=y&auid=8154059
People like books of last words. Last words either have a feeling of aptness—such as Beethoven's famous raging at the heavens in a thunderstorm before he died—or have a kind of comic twist that we presume is fabricated, such as W. C. Fields's proclamation that he would rather be in Philadelphia.
Consequently, I don't think you can trust the details of supposed last words. This is just as well, since the reality of actual last words is often not pretty or symmetrical. Most last words are dealt in times of agony or are expressions of surprise, since most people are not given the chance to compose with any care their own last words.
Of course, people can produce last words if some planning is enabled by deliberation. Too tidy is often a fake. Too chaotic is often authentic but not interesting.
Last words are often final: and that's all they need to be.
—Richard W. Bailey
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