Death Meditations: Saying Goodbye

Famous Last Words are preposterous. I seriously doubt, for example, that John Barrymore actually said,

“Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.”

and then died. I don’t believe it.

As a hospice volunteer, I have been at the bedside of many dying people and I can’t think of any one who had much of anything to say at the end. Dying people don’t tend to talk much.