I've been struck by how many different ways folks will look back on their lives and pick out what most delighted them. Let's take a look at what they say on their death beds, or on contemplating that moment. We'll consider Georgia O'Keeffe, Claude Monet, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Charles Darwin, and the 18th century French writer Voltaire.
Take Georgia O'keeffe. "When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore," she said halfway through her life. What a sense of place! This wildly successful modernist painter, whose work ranged from flowers to cityscapes to surrealistic combinations of mountains with skulls and flowers floating huge above them, would miss spending her days in the distinctive New Mexico countryside. It was a home she stumbled onto whilst fleeing her philandering, domineering husband Alfred Stieglitz and the tumult of his New York City. She fell in love with the landscape of New Mexico instantly, and spent the rest of her life there, returning to New York City only for the wildly successful fall shows where Stieglitz demanded (and got) hitherto unmatched prices for her works. (And where Stieglitz's exhibits of nude photos of Okeeffe shocked her into tears, and made her an instant celebrity.) Upon his death in 1946, she didn't return to "the city" at all, but spent her remaining years in the landscape that was wholly enchanting to her: her true home.
Roaming the northwestern New Mexico landscape, exploring the dry valleys, mountains, and towering cliffs, brought her happiness for over half a century. She purchased an early Ford coupe, removed the front seat so she could mount a canvas there, and sat on the back seat painting what she saw as she roamed the countryside (echoing Claude Monet roaming and painting from his boat on the Seine). Much of what she painted was direct and representational for the most part. Much of it was surrealistic juxtapositions of what she saw. Many days she merely walked the landscape, collecting flowers or skulls or hip bones of long-dead animals. And painted them, in various spatial relationships, or looking up at the sky through the hip bone's obturator foramen, either in "real time" color or bright red and orange--playing, reveling in the world "as I see it." She was perfectly content with living in and painting her beloved landscape during the day, then retiring with her hot tea and classical music in her Ghost Ranch or Abiquiu homes; then rising early the next morn to watch the sun rise from her rooftop aery. Happy.
Or the French impressionist Claude Monet. On his death bed in 1926, he looked back on his long and incredibly successful career and admitted "All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it." Somewhat earlier, he had observed that "I have no other wish than to mingle more closely with nature, and I aspire to no other destiny than to work and live in harmony with her laws." This was a person entranced with the interplay of sunlight, wind, and waves at the Norman seashore, and with the Japanese bridge and water lilies of his pond created by the diversion of a tributary of the nearby Seine. This was all he needed to inspire him to a career of 66 years of paintings of wind, water, skies, ponds, and flowers. By broad consensus he was the apex of French painting. Unlike Okeeffe, for whom a particular place entranced her, Monet was rather entranced by the interplay of natural processes, "to let my brush bear witness to it."
Water, sky, and flowers dominated Monet's work, whether at the seashore of Normandy or from his boat on the Seine or from his famous garden at Giverny. When ponds were not available at Giverny he petitioned the local authorities and created his own, planted it with bamboo and water lilies, then doubled its size and added a Japanese bridge. He had long been inspired by Japanese woodprints, and filled his home and kitchen with them on his walls. He gardened incessantly. "I dug, planted, weeded myself; in the evenings the children watered." The kitchen garden provided food for the table; the flower garden provided subjects for his paintings. Even as his eyesight failed him, he painted still, his canvases becoming larger and larger, filled to bursting with the beauty of the world. By the end, he built a huge, high gallery to accommodate paintings six feet tall and 20 feet long, soon after his death to fill the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris and awe centuries of visitors—his witness to the beauty of the universe.
American naturalist and cultural critic Henry David Thoreau led a troubled life alternating between the close study of his beloved New England, especially the Concord River, and his thorough disgust at the lives of "quiet desperation" of the people who lived there. As a young man, he was deeply unhappy, and urged by his best (and nearly only) friend, the poet Ellery Channing, to move to Walden Pond: "go out upon that (land)…and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." In his famous Walden, or Life in the Woods, Thoreau alternates between two moods: exalting the intellectual life of books and spiritual explorations in Eastern civilizations through the centuries, on the one hand, and losing himself in the present daily beauty and rootedness of the natural world, roaming the rivers and forests of New England, on the other. Early in his short life, and in the Walden Pond book, he seems to favor the exotic, ageless intellectual glories of books.
But later in life, Thoreau mellows, becomes more interested in the rivers and woods; he throws himself into a study of the native Americans and how they live immersed in the natural world, observing their daily lives and accompanying them on hunting and foraging trips. Thoreau had contracted tuberculosis at age 18. Upon his death bed, at age 44, with Ellery Channing beside him again, he says in a low, gentle voice, "Now comes good sailing." Finally, Thoreau is at home in the winds and waters of the world. Then, whispered softly, "Moose," and, finally, "Indian." Here is his home at last: the forest, and the animals and humans living there, in harmony with the earth, even as Thoreau joins that harmony at death.
John Muir kissed the cheek of death more often than perhaps any civilian who ever lived in his adventures throughout the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges on America's west coast and the huge glaciers of Alaska. Environmentalist Bill McKibben has observed that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild…a language of ecstasy and exuberance." Truly he is declared the Father of the National Park system and the Father of American Environmentalism. Near the end, in his home in the Alhambra Valley north of San Francisco, he feels his lungs filling with fluid, and updates the home with new furnishings and conveniences for daughters Wanda and Helen. He pens his last entry in his Journals, thinking of death: "The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang—home-going. So the snow-flowers (snowflakes) go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death's arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit—waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at his own heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast—all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers, and enjoy life as we do, share heaven's blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity." The masterful, assured Muir invites us to explore and rejoice in the natural places of our beautiful world, and to join him there in life and in death.
Muir's life was filled to bursting with these explorations and rejoicings. As a youth, Muir walked a thousand miles from Indiana to Florida, collecting plants. When a bout of malaria prevented him from his planned trip down the Amazon, Muir sailed to California and began several decades of exploration of the Sierra Nevada range, where he discovered relic glaciers. Intrigued by glaciers, he spent another several decades exploring mature glaciers in Alaska, often alone. He early learned (to his amazement) that he could make a living by writing about his explorations for Eastern magazines and newspapers, and his joy in the beauty of the natural world. His writings were full of chapters devoted to water ouzel birds, or to the Douglas squirrels of Sequoia forests, or to the Wild sheep of the mountains, or to the glories of Sugar pines, "the noblest pine yet discovered, surpassing all others not merely in size but also in kingly beauty and majesty." Through his writings and his life, Muir became the confidante of mountain men, Presidents, railroad magnates, and countless common folk encountered on his journeys. He indeed teaches and shows all of us that the earth's creatures—including humans—"all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love…die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity."
Charles Darwin's last words are not particularly uplifting. He had been shattered by the early death of his favorite child, ten-year-old Annie. He avoided the funeral of his father and his great mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell—probably because all the graveside promises of life beyond death in the mansions of a loving (yet strict!) God seemed so utterly unbelievable, indeed repugnant, to him. Darwin had looked forward to the birth of his first grandson in 1876, and was in attendance bedside with his son Francis for the event. After the birth of the grandson, Bernard, Francis and Darwin watched, helpless, as the wife Amy suffered agonizing convulsions and died shrieking. So as he lay on his own death bed in 1882, Darwin had no edifying words for us. Amidst pain, nausea, and spasms, he retched blood for hours, which soon made his white beard red and sticky. "I am not the least afraid to die" he said, anticipating that his friends and enemies would wonder. To his wife Emma he said, "My love, my precious love." As the night wore on, he muttered "If I could but die," again and again. Then he was gone. The photographs of the caped, elderly Darwin, with his ineffably-sad face staring somberly into the camera, give us an accurate record of the man.
The closest thing to inspirational might be Darwin's closing words of his great work The Origin of Species: "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Yes, our world is marked by beauty and wonder, and we are nestled within it part and parcel, thoroughly at home even amidst its pains and heartbreaks.
Finally, and very briefly, a description of the towering writer and philosopher Voltaire's last words. Upon his death bed, the officious attending priest urged him to explicitly renounce Satan. Replied Voltaire, "Surely this is no time to make new enemies."
Indeed.