What we talk about it in life is less important than what we do. Our actions define us more than our words. Still, there is something fascinating about the last words one speaks before passing. Sometimes it’s planned, sometimes not, sometimes funny, and sometimes sad. It is the unpredictability of what comes next that makes these words so precious. It makes us look inside; what would our last words be if we knew they would be our last?
Theodore Roosevelt
npr.org
“Please put out the light, James,” requested Roosevelt to the family servant, James Amos. That was January 6, 1919. He passed away in his sleep at his home at Sagamore Hill in New York after suffering breathing difficulty. They found that a clot detached from his lungs and traveled to his brain while he was asleep.
Sigmund Freud
“This is absurd,” was the good doctor’s final assessment. Freud died on September 23, 1939, in Hampstead, United Kingdom. He may have been commenting on dying so far from his beloved Vienna, which had fallen to the Nazis at that point. He may also have been commenting on cancer, which had consumed him. Rather than let it rob him of his faculties, Freud commissioned a physician to assist him in suicide.
