We live in our bodies and die in our bodies. In his final letter, he wrote of living a “posthumous existence” his last phrase becomes his eloquent, courteous and self-effacing goodbye before he exits the stage on which he has had such a small parcel of time: “I always made an awkward bow.” Dying as a performance, dying as an art and a practice, dying as something solemnly profound and sorrowful and at the same time as normal, natural dying as physical and as spiritual dying as the end of a whole world because, as Oliver Sacks wrote, when dying himself: “There is no one like anyone else, ever.” Not all passing can be gentle and not everyone can be brought to acceptance in the face of their own obliteration From the shrinking circle of his life, from his frail body drowning in itself, he reached outwards towards the friends he was leaving. W hen John Keats was dying of TB in Rome, just 25 and far from family and home, he wrote a series of beautifully judged, empathetic letters of farewell that deal lightly (yet never falsely) with his physical suffering and his emotional anguish.
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