Deathly Hallow

I have in my life a secret goal. As I pass through life, accumulating experience wrapped up in words, I am entering certain things into a library, which will be ultimately used in a competition. I am searching for the poem, quote, paragraph, or magic spell to memorize and moan weakly on my deathbed. Everyone crowding around my bed (ideally in my bedroom of old, but most likely the white hospital kind) will experience an insurgence of feeling: sorrow at my passing, fulfillment from the beauty of the words, and love at my perfect selection. I aim to make them cry. A few minutes after I faintly chuckle at them all crying and pass beyond, they will remember this post, and laugh. Knowing that my last few minutes will come of a product of memorizing a poem or a paragraph in order to orchestrate the most perfect final moments in an attempt to be dramatic and create a perfect story for my descendants, they will start laughing. My final moments will have been a wonderful and caring joke. In order for these last moments to happen correctly, though, I have to find the perfect passage and memorize it now. It's kind of a wonderful journey, to keep death in mind. What will symbolize me in 5 or 85 years? What means the most? So far, I have a few candidates.

One I just rediscovered:

"I am going, you see, to the Mountain. You remember how we used to look and long? And all the stories of my gold and amber house, up there against the sky, where we thought we should never really go? The greatest King of all was going to build it for me. If only you could believe it, Sister! No, listen. Do not let grief shut up your ears and harden your heart...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from...my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels lnot like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now - ?"
-Istra/Psyche before the sacrifice, from C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold.

I also considered the quote about going up to the mountain from The Great Divorce, but I figured that this one was much more passionate and said close to the same thing. There's also a great poem I am considering...

As virtuous men pass mildly away, 

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, no sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, 

Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined, 

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so 

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other do.

And thought it in the center sit, 

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as it comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

-A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, John Donne

It would be so cruel. and it would be so delicious. But really, Donne knows what he's doing. Always. Good man, that. To be shorter and close to my roots, my last section, for the moment:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale 

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Shakespeare.

Ach, Shakespeare. The true love of my life. I suppose this grand scheme all depends on what I'm feeling at the moment. I suppose I might ruin it all and spout out all three at once. That would be like me. But I rest in the comfort that no matter what I say, bitter or refined, the ones standing near me will know me and understand, soaking in the words as a gesture and not as a direct message. Because really, who wouldn't want to quote Shakespeare or C.S.Lewis on their deathbed, simply to attempt a grand final gesture? It would make my...death...other things will make my life.