Exit Lines

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Danserindens_kaerlighedsdroem_001.jpg

Last words of executed criminals:

  • “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy! Don’t hang me! I can’t die! I’m not ready to die! I don’t want to die!” — North Carolina burglar Henry F. Andrews, 1879
  • “Where is my little boy? Look at me, my son, and take warning.” — Louisiana murderer Edward Rector, 1884
  • “What time is it? I wish you’d hurry up. I want to get to hell in time for dinner.” — Wyoming murderer John Owens, 1886
  • “These are for my sister [taking off her eyeglasses]. Please see that she gets them.” — Vermont murderer Mary Mabel Rogers, 1905
  • “They can’t kill a smile!” — Montana murderer Harrison Gibson, smiling, 1917
  • “I have something of interest to tell –” — California murderer Paul Rowland, cut off by his hanging, 1929
  • “Make it snappy.” — California murderer Charles H. Simpson, 1931
  • “You might get me a gas mask.” — Arizona murderer Jack Sullivan, 1936
  • “So long.” — Utah robber and murderer James Joseph Roedl, 1945
  • “Kiss my ass.” — John Wayne Gacy, to a prison guard, 1994
  • “Merry Christmas.” — Virginia rapist and murderer Lem Tuggle, 1996

Before his lethal injection in 2007, Arizona murderer Robert Comer said, “Go Raiders.”

| Death

“Curious Question of Survivorship”

A curious case has recently been decided in England. A Mr. and Mrs. Hambling were both killed by a falling building. The husband was taken from the ruins quite dead, while the body of his wife was warm. The question was raised whether it could be safely presumed that the wife survived her husband, as this would cause a variation in the distribution of the property. The court decided against the supposition.

— Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine, June 1859

| Death · Society

Late

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_Woollcott.jpg

Alexander Woollcott asked that his ashes be scattered at his alma mater, Hamilton College in Utica, N.Y.

Somehow they were misdirected to Colgate University, and they arrived at Hamilton with 67 cents postage due.

He once wrote, “Many of us spend half of our time wishing for things we could have if we didn’t spend half our time wishing.”

| Death · Literature

Death Mundane

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tintoretto_am_totenbett_seiner_tochter.jpg

Uninspired last words:

  • “Peter, take good care of my horse.” — Winfield Scott
  • “Have you brought the checkbook, Alfred?” — Samuel Butler
  • “Take away those pillows — I shall need them no more.” — Lewis Carroll
  • “You heard me, Mike.” — John Barrymore
  • “I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time.” — Chekhov
  • “I can’t sleep.” — James M. Barrie
  • “Moose. Indian.” — Thoreau
  • “I’ve never felt better.” — Douglas Fairbanks
  • “The nourishment is palatable.” — Millard Fillmore

Told jokingly that he had drunk a dose of ink by mistake, Sydney Smith said, “Then bring me all the blotting paper there is in the house.”

| Death

Legal Grief

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Advokat,_Engelsk_advokatdr%C3%A4kt,_Nordisk_familjebok.png

According to tradition, barristers wear black because they’re still in mourning for Queen Mary II, who died in 1694.

Or, properly speaking, they adopted black on Mary’s death at the wish of William III and have retained it as a convenient costume ever since.

Mary is most commonly cited; sometimes another Stuart queen is named. Sir Frederick Pollock, who served as Chief Baron of the Exchequer for more than 25 years, famously joked that the whole bar went into mourning in the time of Queen Anne (Mary’s younger sister) and never came out again.

He wrote, “I have always been told that formerly the Bar wore, in Court, coats, &c. of any colour under the gown, which also need not have been black; but that on the death of Queen Anne the Bar went into mourning, and since then every barrister has generally worn black.”

| Death · History · Society

Memorial

John T—-, Schoolmaster.
May he be punished as often as he punished us,
He was a hard old shell.
He said the Lord’s Prayer every morning.
May the Lord forgive him as often as he forgave us.
That was never.
We his scholars rear this stone over his ashes
Though they are not worth it.
We are glad his reign is over.
Amen.

— Massachusetts tombstone, quoted in John R. Kippax, Churchyard Literature, 1876

| Death · Society

Unquote

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Arnold_Boecklin_-_Island_of_the_Dead%2C_Third_Version.JPG

“He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.” — Marcus Aurelius

| Death · Quotations

Waste Not, Want Not

Another gentleman, mentioned in the text-books … seemed to have a ruling passion against waste, which the court respected. The testator devised his property to a stranger, thus wholly disinheriting the heir or next of kin, and directed that his executors should cause some parts of his bowels to be converted into fiddle strings; that others should be sublimed into smelling salts, and that the remainder of his body should be vitrified into lenses for optical purposes. In a letter attached to the will the testator said: ‘The world may think this to be done in a spirit of singularity or whim, but I have a mortal aversion to funeral pomp, and I wish my body to be converted into purposes useful to mankind.’

— Basil Jones, “Eccentricities of Sane Testators,” Law Notes, November 1908

| Death · Oddities

Immemorial

http://www.palmbeachbiketours.com/santa-fes-dennis-oleary-who-was-he/
Image: Ken Steinhoff

New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Cemetery contains 16,000 headstones and only one statue, a life-size sandstone carving of Army private Dennis O’Leary, who died in 1901 at age 23.

Legend has it that O’Leary was stationed at lonely Fort Wingate, where he carved the statue himself, inscribed the death date, and shot himself. Military records show that a Pvt. Dennis O’Leary died of tuberculosis on this date. But then who carved the statue, and why?

| Death · Oddities