A Few Last Words

“Bobby, put the snakes in the bucket.”

Technically those weren’t my grandma’s last words, but it’s the last coherent thing I recall her saying, and anyway it’s such a good sentence I believe I honor her by putting it forward as her final utterance. It is a fact that she was mortally afraid of snakes and that therefore this bald imperative speaks of hidden terror in a fevered mind, but at least to a small degree I think that in life she reveled in this fear as a way of throwing her not-so-quiet courage into relief. I have powerful memories of her maniacally hacking a defenseless garter snake into about fifty wriggling pieces with a hoe, and even more powerful memories of her emptying a load of .38 Specials into the garage from my grandpa’s bedroom the night some sorely unprepared thief attempted to siphon gas from their station wagon. She had some kind of fire in the belly, I kid you not. 

I’ll admit too that I didn’t hear the comma after “Bobby,” but it’s easier to think of her ordering my eldest cousin to take on this unpleasant task than to imagine the sentence as a recollection of some act of serpent-handling he might have undertaken of his own accord. I’m sure Bobby would have complied but I rather doubt he would have initiated the action, unless perhaps by way of browbeating his younger brother Billy—but this would have been kept hidden from her in the same way that we kept all life threatening behavior from the knowledge of our elders.

I got to thinking about this earlier this morning whilst reading a harrowing piece in the gray lady about the last text messages of Covid victims. It’s a grim horror, and I find myself perhaps finally fully cured of a long fascination with last words, particularly those uttered in the midst of catastrophes. My good friend Stacy shares this fascination, and over the years we’ve swapped various disaster books as well as tales of black-box recordings on doomed airplanes—a particularly compelling wellspring of ghoulishness. Last words uttered by pilots and copilots come in two varieties depending on the amount of lead time granted by Fate: either dry technical remarks like, “Flaps down ten degrees,” or earthy interjections like, “Oh shit!”

There’s a weird frisson about plane crashes. All flights feature that disquieting moment when the flight attendant seals the door and your fate is bound to that of the vehicle. It’s a hermeneutic world; a bubble cut off from the rest of humanity. Within it life goes on, and most of the time you land and the bubble pops and you’re back in the fold. But every once in a while the bubble is smashed out of existence and we’re left with only the knowledge that it did exist, for five minutes or a couple hours or whatever. People had conversations. People listened to music. People worked on work. But everything they did in the bubble is lost to us like matter into a black hole.

Hence the power even of the mostly pedestrian comments that get recorded onto black boxes. They are tiny electrical sparks; inferences about life inside those bubbles. Even the name of the device—black box—hints at this window into a lost world. It’s like something you might find in a wizard’s workshop, next to the larks’ tongues in aspic. 

Objects in photo are blacker than they appear.

Honestly the power of the black box receded quite a bit for me after 9/11. I never wanted to know more about the Falling Man¹ or the last cellphone calls from Flight 93—the alacrity with which Paul Greengrass leapt upon a TV dramatization of the latter always struck me as a rather grotesque commercialization before the smoke had even cleared. I don’t know why Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve is any different—probably for the same reason I don’t mourn the dead at Agincourt. I suppose 9/11 will always be more visceral to me than, say, the Tenerife Disaster, or United Flight 232.² I have listened to the black box recordings from both of those. 

The charitable explanation for this fascination is that like any human I crave connection, and it’s somehow comforting to know that even in those sealed tubes slamming into mountains and into oceans and into other sealed tubes there is still a last word—from a subjective point of view—to be had. The Falling Man is only a photograph—an objective record—and the horrors of our own imaginations. I can’t deal with the raw loneliness of that. 

Loss of connection has been, of course, a prime feature of the pandemic. Unlike earlier pandemics, however, we’ve had the Internet—I’m not sure how any of us could have done it otherwise. For those speaking their last words alone in hospitals I reckon this is cold comfort. For those of us who have managed to remain in the world of the living, we have retained the freedom to be inundated by the musings of Neanderthals in their millions, inveighing against the products of medical research or statistics or whatever other perfectly non-partisan matter has been chosen as grist for the whirling knife-fight which has consumed our politics. I often think of Henry David Thoreau writing that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” It’s true, but I don’t think Thoreau ever envisaged how many words it could take to communicate nothing of import. 

There’s an interesting contrast there—between the tons of raw sewage that flow through the coaxial cable into my house each day and those gnomic final expressions that can command so much attention if you let them. Nothing you can drown in can be precious, by definition, and yet words are precious when the context changes just so, like flickers of light from faces of a gem turning in the sunshine. Words can be slurry, poured on with utter disregard for their individual beauty or power. Or they can pulse with meaning when selected with care—something I think perhaps some dying minds do by default, instinctively recognizing the extreme economy that the moment requires. When I think of last words the first ones that come to mind are those spoken by one of the great traitors in history—Stonewall Jackson, who, wracked with terminal pain and fever in a lonely house in Virginia in 1863, conjured as beautiful a morsel of peace and poetry anyone could be expected to produce; something completely orthogonal to his day job; a line so pure it almost makes you forget the damage he did to our country. “Let us cross over the river,” he said, “and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Every one of us should be blessed with so fine a farewell.

1. I can’t bring myself to link to an explanation. Google it if you don’t remember and really must.

2. United 232 is actually a pretty fascinating story featuring a heroic pilot and more survivors than victims due to his actions.