Elegant dying

[storeynicholas]

I find NCW's post thought-provoking. It mentions the most significant death of all for Christians - indeed, despite all the negative propaganda, a significant death for Muslims too (since the Koran records that Jesus of Nazareth will return at the Day Of Judgement) and his condemnation on earth and his passing over were the epitome of Grace; a word now shifting in its meaning, much like 'Charm' - nowadays, 'Grace' is a word almost always used to signify just some perceived, physical attribute - like "the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire" - and 'Charm' somehow signifies something slightly dodgy - Raymond Chandler said that F Scott Fitzgerald 'had charm, as Keats would have understood the word'. True grace and charm and elegance in life must culminate in a gracious passing. Someone who used to teach me died in the middle of May - - at a ripe old age (the way that we use the word 'ripe', in this connexion, I suppose denotes ready to drop from the bough) -- and she had had something of a hard living and a hard dying -- but all stoically borne -- in all the near half century that I knew her. But as well as whatever she took away beyond, she left something behind too - the things that she taught me and the utter demand to live each day as though it were one's last - and the memory of her laughter in the well-known, wry and axiomatic observation that, after birth: only two things are certain: 'death and taxes'.
NJS

[RWS]

I cannot do better than NCW has done in quoting the finest and most precise of last words, though T. J. ("Stonewall") Jackson's "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees", Robert E. Lee's perhaps apocraphal "Strike the tent", and Goethe's "Mehr Licht!" have also affected my thoughts and feelings.

[storeynicholas]

Coleridge, Pope, Edward Fitzgerald, Tennyson, W B Yeats and T S Eliot all have a seat in the death room too ................ even Dylan Thomas ............... and even fired-up as he was. For my part, I still don't know .............. But there must be some relevance in the great scheme and scope, for all the minutiae which we discuss in this forum, for the great dissolution, must there not? even if we do not fathom, even closely, what that might be.......save for, being well turned-out, for a lunch with friends - ah, yes, laughter and the love of friends............
NJS

[Luca]

I'm told J. M. Keynes was asked on his deathbed if he had any regrets and responded thus:

"I wish I had drunk a little more champagne".

I, for one, took that as an admonition!

[storeynicholas]

I recall a progamme including an interview with the late Sir John Betjeman when he was old and ill and in a wheelchair and the interviewer asked him whether he had any regrets and replied that he wished that he'd had more sex - which I found quite funny at the time - especially since some call it the lttle death.
NJS