Last Words

In Inside Out, my friend Judith Flesch Rose’s new memoir, I read and was deeply moved by her parents’ last words to her.   Mother: “Why are you crying, darling?”  Father: “I love you.”

My mother died towards the end of my sophomore year in college, so after I returned to college for the second semester, I never spoke to her again.  During that semester, however, she wrote me one letter, assuring me that she would recover from her illness.  I’ve kept it all these years, but in our last move I misplaced it.  I suppose I will find it some day, but in the meantime, I can’t tell you what her last words to me were, if indeed a letter can be considered last words.

“I’m dying,” were my father’s last words to me.   He was sitting up in bed in the ICU of a hospital in Albany.   I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.  I could at least have repeated what he said., something like, “You feel you are dying.”  But I didn’t even say that and I’ve felt bad about it ever since.

“I love you,” the last words Judith Rose’s father spoke to her, were the perfect last words, the words I would have wanted to hear from each of my parents.  I can’t recall either of them ever telling me that they loved me.  And even though I knew they did, I would have liked to hear it.  When I last saw my mother she was in a coma, unable of course to tell me anything.  When I last saw my father, he was consumed with his own agony, unable to say more than “I’m dying.”

Just about every day I tell my wife I love her.  I will try to tell my children I love them more often than I do.  And I hope I will have the strength and the luck to tell them that at the very end.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved