114: Last Words
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
"I've been thinking about the gangster, Arnold Rothstein, the guy who's often credited with fixing the 1919 World Series. I've been thinking about his last words. After he was shot during a poker game in 1928, someone asked who shot him. "Me mother did it," he said. His mother, even in death he was not going to rat. You know, at that point, what is the killer going to do to him? Aiming his mother was nothing more than reasserting who he was, one last time, in the face of death, who he was, which was a guy who would not rat. And this is what we want from last words. Let me tell you, this kind of summing up of who a person is. You know, sometimes you'll see those collections of famous last words reprinted in the paper or in the Sunday magazine. And they all have this quality. I always do, pretending to sum up an entire life. Bing Crosby. That was a great game of golf, fellers. W.C. Fields. I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes. Oscar Wilde, either that wallpaper goes, or I do. And you know the fact is, Oscar Wilde didn't even say that on his deathbed. It's a remark he made to a friend at a café a month before he died. That's how much we want to believe in these things. But, you know, we want our lives to mean something, and we want to believe that words can capture that meaning. And seen in that way, last words, attempts at last words, a one final shot, and figuring it all out, summing it all up, did this way of asserting the fact of our existence. At the exact moment of our annihilation. Well, from W.B. E.C. Chicago and Public Radio International, it's this American life, I'm Ira Glass, today's program, last words, several case studies for you. Act one, actions speak louder, story of people who are perfectly eloquent, and the limits of what even the best chosen last words can say and do for people. Act two, the unknown soldier, a story in which forty voices become one voice here on your radio. Act three, Rosebud, an act about which the less said the better. Act four, how the living used the dead. Greta Griel Marcus explains what rock fans use dead rock stars for. Act five, black box. We go through transcripts from those black box flight recorders, the ones we're covered from airplane crashes. Act six, what goes through your head? We have a story from writer Tobias Wolf, stay with us. Act one, actions speak louder, this is the story of people attempting to surround death in a web of words, to better understand it, of very eloquent people and their last words, and of what last words can and cannot accomplish. Kate Smith and Eloise Pickard Smith were married for over five decades, and they died one day apart.
Transcription truncated.