Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős’ epitaph reads “Végre nem butulok tovább” — “I’ve finally stopped getting dumber.”
Death
One World at a Time
Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. Isaac Story, Dec. 5, 1801, on the afterlife:
When I was young I was fond of the speculations which seemed to promise some insight into that hidden country, but observing at length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or to think concerning them, and have reposed my head on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should be forced to use it.
“I have thought it better, by nourishing the good passions & controlling the bad, to merit an inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future to him who has been so good for the past.”
Reunion
In the church of St. Mary Magdalen in Mulbarton, Norfolk, is mounted a copper diptych, a memorial to resident Sarah Scargill, who died in 1680. The left panel remembers Scargill as “a Person of unimitable Devotion, of a most nice and tender Conscience, of sweet Behaviour, and in all Things so faithfull a Servant of God, that I dare contest the Divine Goodness to have rewarded her.” The right panel reads:
Dear Love! one feather’d Minute, and I come,
To lye down in thy dark retiring Room,
And mingle Dust with thine, that we may have,
As when alive, one Bed, so dead, one Grave,
And may my Soule teare through the vaulted Sky,
To be with Thine, to all Eternity.
Oh! how our Bloodless Forms will that Day greet,
With Love Divine, when we again shall meet,
Devest of all contagion of the Flesh,
Full fill’d with ever lasting Joys, and fresh,
In Heaven above, (and’t may be) cast an Eye,
How far Elyzium doth beneath us lye.
Dear! I dis-body and away,
More swift than Wind,
Or flying Hind,
I come, I come, away.
Daniel Scargill.
A Long Sleep
In 1999, archaeologists made a stunning find near the summit of a stratovolcano on the Argentina–Chile border. Three Inca children, sacrificed in a religious ritual 500 years earlier, had been preserved immaculately in the small chamber in which they had been left to die. Due to the dryness and low temperature of the mountainside, the bodies had frozen before they could dehydrate, making them “the best-preserved Inca mummies ever found.” Even the hairs on their arms were intact; one of the hearts still contained frozen blood.
Known as the Children of Llullaillaco, they’re on display today at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Salta.
A Long Rest
When Japanese authorities sought to honor Tokyo’s oldest man in 2010, they were rebuffed repeatedly by his family. When police finally broke into the house, they found Sogen Kato’s mummified corpse in a first-floor bedroom (1), together with a newspaper from 1978 (2) and a rotary telephone (3). An official said, “His family must have known he has been dead all these years and acted as if nothing happened. It’s so eerie.”
Kato’s granddaughter told a friend, “My grandfather shut himself in a room on the first floor of our home 32 years ago, and we couldn’t open the door from the outside. My mother said, ‘Leave him in there,’ and he was left as he was. I think he’s dead.”
Another granddaughter was eventually convicted of fraud for accepting the dead man’s pension payments. “The defendant committed a malicious crime with the selfish motive of securing revenue for her family,” the judge said in suspending the 2.5-year sentence. “However, she has paid back the pension benefits and expressed remorse for the crime.”
Unfinished
During the Black Death, Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani wrote, “The priest who confessed the sick and those who nursed them so generally caught the infection that the victims were abandoned and deprived confession, sacrament, medicine, and nursing … And many lands and cities were made desolate. And this plague lasted till ________.”
He left the blank so that he could record the date of the plague’s end, but then he himself succumbed, dying in 1348.
Advance Billing
When the philosopher Antisthenes was being initiated into the mysteries of Orpheus, and the priest told him that those who vowed themselves to that religion were to receive after death eternal and perfect blessings, he said to him: ‘Why, then, do you not die yourself?’
— Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, 1576
R.I.P.
One of the most moving epitaphs I ever read — actually it is an inscription — is in Ixelles cemetery, Brussels, on the tomb of a girl who had been the mistress of Gen. Georges Boulanger, a former War Minister of France. She died in July 1891; that September, heartbroken, Boulanger made the supreme romantic gesture, one that many, many bereft lovers have threatened, but very, very few have carried through: He shot himself at her tomb. He is buried beside her, and his last, impassioned cry rings out in bronze:
AI-JE BIEN PU VIVRE
2 MOIS 1/2 SANS TOI!(‘How did I live two and a half months without you!’) Romeo said nothing more poignant.
— J. Bryan, Hodgepodge: A Commonplace Book, 1986
Companion
Rinaldo Carnielo’s sculpture Tenax Vitae stands in the Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo in Florence.
After meeting the sculptor in 1893, Helen Zimmern observed that “for him, the shadow of death pervades all existence,” but “he cares not one jot whether his statues find purchasers so long as he himself is satisfied with the results.”
“The Only Will Ever Written in Shorthand”
An 1897 article on curious wills in the Strand describes this 1813 will by the Rev. Hugh Worthington of Highbury Place, Islington. One side reads:
Northampton Square, June 16th, 1813. I, Hugh Worthington, give and bequeath to my dear Eliza Price, who is my adopted child, all I do or may possess, real and personal, to be at her sole and entire disposal; and I do appoint William Kent, Esq., of London Wall, my respected friend, with the said Eliza Price to execute this my last will and testament. — HUGH WORTHINGTON.
The other reads:
Most dearly beloved, my Eliza. Very small as this letter is, it contains the copy of my very last will. I have put it with your letters, that it may be sure to fall into your hands. Should accident or any other cause destroy the original, I have taken pains to write this very clearly, that you may read it easily. I do know you will perfect yourself in shorthand for my sake. Tomorrow we go for Worthing, I most likely never to return. I hope to write a few lines to express the best wishes, and prayers, and hopes of thy true, HUGH WORTHINGTON.