Famous last words? Say them before it’s too late

The deathbed is where we impart one final piece of wisdom, settle one final score

I was at a funeral recently. The woman who had died had reached her ninth decade and had been a wonderfully kind lady. In the eulogy, her son remarked that she had seen her death coming; that it was the best kind of death and one that would not be available to most of us. She had prepared herself for the end and had been able to say what she needed to say to the people she loved.

Part of our understanding of death is the deathbed scene. It’s where we impart one final piece of wisdom, settle one final score or say something so witty that our erudition in the face of the grim reaper will b

Ke celebrated for years to come. Oscar Wilde, lying in a fleapit hotel on the left bank of the Seine, took a look at his surroundings and said: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” It was the most Wildean of comments: arch, funny, tasteful and poignant. And 100 years after he died, he had the last word when the cursed wallpaper was replaced by red, blue, green and gold frescos based on designs by his friend Aubrey Beardsley.

If we can’t be as witty as Wilde, what should we say? A survey carried out recently found that 83 per cent of the 2,198 of adults polled had received final words of advice from their loved ones — 62 per cent had received advice about their relationships, while 56 per cent had received career advice. After that, wisdom relating to family (43 per cent), education (39 per cent) and finances (32 per cent) was the most common.

It’s heartening that advice about relationships tops the poll. Perhaps all the career and financial advice was full of truth, but there still seems to be something a little depressing about being given some final top tips on how to nail that key job interview or how to correctly fill out a mortgage application. Of course, you’d be in great company if you were to impart financial advice. Bob Marley’s final words, “Money can’t buy life,” were financially themed. And Plato tells us that, having been sentenced to death and having drunk the poison that would kill him, Socrates turned to his friend Crito and said: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don’t forget.” Crito assured the philosopher that he would not forget and then, seeking some greater piece of wisdom, asked Socrates if he had anything more to say. He did not.

These things — career, finance — are all an important part of the rich tapestry that is life but surely, in the end, it’s not only hippies who recognise that friendships and relationships are the things that matter the most. “Only connect,” reads the epigraph to EM Forster’s novel Howards End, and this need to reach out to others is perhaps strongest at the end.

Connecting with fellow human beings

Other famous figures chose to celebrate connecting with their fellow human beings by paying tribute to love. “I love you very much, my dear Beaver,” the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said to his partner Simone de Beauvoir. “Goodnight my kitten,” was Ernest Hemingway’s offering to his wife Mary before he killed himself. “Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy,” Charlotte Brontë told her husband, while T.S. Eliot simply whispered the name of his wife, Valerie, and nothing more. If this is all a bit too touchy-feely for you, then the deathbed is also a great place to tell people “what you really think of them” or, if you are feeling Shakespearean, order that your death be avenged. “How the little piglets would grunt if they knew how the old boar suffered,” the ninth-century Norse warlord Ragnar Lodbrok said as he was being devoured, naked, in a pit by a horde of snakes. The “little piglets” he was referring to were his sons (he was the “old boar”) and indeed the sagas record that they sought and exacted vengeance by ritually executing Ælla, the Northumbrian king who had cast their father into the snake pit.

Your final moments offer you a chance to impart wisdom by reflecting on your own life, something that many public figures do. In Karen Thorsen’s documentary about the great American writer James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin’s brother, David, recalls that James hoped that he had done his work so that when he was gone, those looking could find “in all the turmoil, through the wreckage and the rumble … something that I left behind”. Having considered all this, you might just think “to hell with it” and follow in the footsteps of Karl Marx, who hollered at his housekeeper: “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!” In short, say it now, before it’s too late.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015