Famous Last Words

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"I've never felt better" - Douglas Fairbanks

After suffering a heart attack in 1939 at the age of 57, "The King of Silent Hollywood" (Robin Hood, The Thief of Baghdad, The Mask of Zorro) reassured an attendant while resting at home, then went to sleep and died that night.  Fairbanks was an athletic movie star known for his charm, good looks and apparently an ability to gauge his physical condition. 

*I will be adding to this list

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"I wish I had drunk more champagne." - John Maynard Keynes

The British Keynes was not your average economist. Keynes, whose eponymous theories influenced Roosevelt's New Deal and the rise of the European welfare state, was also a member of the famously liberated Bloomsbury group.  He was politically liberal and sexually liberated, sleeping with many of the bohemian men in his circle  and, of course, drinking champagne.  Of that, and government spending, Keynes thought there could never be enough.   

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"It's very beautiful over there." - Thomas Edison
 
The Wizard of Menlo Park, arguably America's foremost inventor, received only three months of schooling in his entire childhood.  Plagued by longlife ans worsening hearing loss, Edison's gifts to the world were more sound (the phonograph and talking movies), more light (the light bulb) and better communication (the telegraph).  Near death in 1931, his second wife, Mina, asked him if he was suffering.  "No," Edison replied, "Just waiting."

Then he looked out of his bedroom window and uttered his last words. 

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"You will show my head to the people it is worth seeing" - George Jaques Danton

Shortly after giving these instructions to his executioner in 1794 the head in question was removed from Danton's body by guillotine.  During the French Revolution Danton was a Parisian lawyer who decried the Reign of Terror which charged him with conspiracy to overthrow the government and then sentenced him to death.

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"This is a very sharp medicine, but a sure remedy for all evil." - Sir Walter Raleigh

Poet, explorer and sometime pirate Sir Walter Raleigh was a loose cannon in the English court.  After his attack on a Spanish camp in South America almost started a war.  England's peace loving king, James I, sent for the headsman.  Yet even people who didn't like Raleigh had to admire the clever exit line he tossed off from the scaffold.

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"I would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than sit in the seat of the mighty." -  Alben W. Barkley

Barkly got his wish when, quoting from the bible before a mock convention in 1956, he died of a heart attack.  Admired for his story telling and oratory, the 77 year old Kentuckian served the Democratic party for 44 years as a congressman, Senate majority leader, and as vice president under Harry Truman.

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"How were the circus receipts in Madison Square Garden?"  - P. T. Barnum

Entertainment and flummery Were Barnum's business to the very end.  During his brilliant career as a showman and shameless bunko artist, P. T. Barnum bamboozled the public into believing that half of a stuffed monkey sewn onto a fishtail was a mermaid, and that an elderly black woman was George Washington's 161 year old nurse.  He later billed his three ring circus as "The Greatest Show on Earth".

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"Please know that I am quite aware of the hazards.  I want to do it because I want to do it.  Women must try to do things as men have tried.  When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."  - Amelia Earhart

Earhart knew as a teenager that she wanted to fly, and fly she did, setting dozens of records for both women and aviators of either sex.  While attempting to circle the globe at the equator in 1937 she disappeared in the central Pacific and was never heard from again.  Theories about her fate have ranged from being sent to spy on the Japanese to becoming a South Pacific fisherman.  Before taking off for the last time,  she wrote this farewell letter to her husband, publisher G. P. Putnam. 

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"Mom did you hear the rain? Mom, I just want to take off in the plane." - Jessica Dubroff

Jessica's parents believed she was so special that she would set a record as the youngest person to fly east across the United States at the age of seven. In 1996 after only four months of flight training, she got as far as Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she spoke her last words over the phone to her mother shortly before leaving on the next leg of her journey.

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"Tell my mother I died for my country. I thought I did it for the best. Useless, useless ... " - John Wilkes Booth

The actor hailed a few years earlier as the "youngest tragedian in the world" was responsible for one of America's great tragedies. After the 27 year old Booth rabidly pro-slavery and quite possibly a Confederate spy assassinated President Lincoln on April 14th 1865 he fled to Virginia where he refused to surrender and was shot in the neck in a burning barn.

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"My story is a love story, but only those who are tortured by love can understand what I mean.  I was pictured as a fat, unfeeling woman.  True, I am fat, but if that is a crime, how many of my sex are guilty?  I am not unfeeling, stupid or moronic.  My last words and my last thoughts are:  Let him without sin cast the first stone."  - Martha Beck

If the 233 pound Martha Beck and her lover, Raymond Fernandes, had committed their crimes today they would be guests on Jeremy Springer.  In the summer of 1949, American tabloids indulged the public's fascination with the trial of the "Lonely Hearts Killers" who had used personal ads to con and murder lonely women.  Beck's lurid testimony and fleshy physique kept her on the front page but just before 1951 execution she seemed to bite the media hand that had fed her.

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"If you send for a doctor I will see him now."  - Emily Jane Bronte

But it was too late to save the 30 year old poet and author of Wuthering Heights from the final stages of tuberculosis.  The stubborn and strong willed Bronte refused medical help until the very end and became the first ill fated Bronte sister to die and untimely death.

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"Am I dying or is this my birthday"  - Lady Astor

As she was dying at 85 the wealthy socialist and the first female member of the British House of Commons awoke to find herself surrounded by her entire family.  She pondered the possible explanations for the gathering with the same acid which that had immortalized her verbal sparring matches with Winston Churchill.  A passionate advocate of women's rights Astor spoke for her entire sex when she declared "We are not asking for superiority for we have always had that; all we ask is equality."

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"Nothing infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God alone doesn't go around this world with his finger on the triggers, his fists on knives, his hands on steering wheels.  Never do we know enough to say a death was the will of God.  My own consolation lies in knowing that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break"  - William Sloane Coffin in an eulogy for his son Alex

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin. former chaplain at Yale and senior minister of New York's Riverside Church, was an early protester against racial segregation and America's involvement in Vietnam.  His eloquence was never more evident than at the memorial service for his son, Alex, who died in an automobile accident in 1983 at the age of 24.   

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"I were miserable if I might not die .... Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,"  - John Donne.

In one of his Holy sonnets, John Donne wrote that death was nothing more than a short sleep before eternal life.  Born Catholic, Donne took Anglican orders in 1615, and went on to become one of the great theatrical preachers of his day.  He delivered his own funeral sermon "Death's Duel," at St Paul's cathedral in 1631, and died a few weeks later, quoting the Lord's Prayer.