death bed essay

Steve Jobs Deathbed Speech

Apple co-founder steve jobs did not leave behind a deathbed warning about how the "non-stop pursuit of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me.", published nov. 7, 2015.

About this rating

In November 2015, a rumor began circulating on social media that when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away at age 56 in 2011, he delivered a speech or left behind a deathbed essay about the meaning of life.

One of the earliest iterations of this rumor we've found was published on gkindshivani.wordpress.com under the title "DID YOU KNOW WHAT WERE THE LAST WORDS OF STEVE JOBS?":

"I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In others' eyes, my life is an epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy. In the end, wealth is only a fact of life that I am accustomed to. At this moment, lying on the sick bed and recalling my whole life, I realize that all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in, have paled and become meaningless in the face of impending death. In the darkness, I look at the green lights from the life supporting machines and hear the humming mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of god of death drawing closer ... Now I know, when we have accumulated sufficient wealth to last our lifetime, we should pursue other matters that are unrelated to wealth ... Should be something that is more important: Perhaps relationships, perhaps art, perhaps a dream from younger days Non-stop pursuing of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me. God gave us the senses to let us feel the love in everyone’s heart, not the illusions brought about by wealth. The wealth I have won in my life I cannot bring with me. What I can bring is only the memories precipitated by love. That's the true riches which will follow you, accompany you, giving you strength and light to go on. Love can travel a thousand miles. Life has no limit. Go where you want to go. Reach the height you want to reach. It is all in your heart and in your hands. What is the most expensive bed in the world? Sick bed ... You can employ someone to drive the car for you, make money for you but you cannot have someone to bear the sickness for you. Material things lost can be found. But there is one thing that can never be found when it is lost — Life. When a person goes into the operating room, he will realize that there is one book that he has yet to finish reading — Book of Healthy Life. Whichever stage in life we are at right now, with time, we will face the day when the curtain comes down. Treasure Love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends. Treat yourself well. Cherish others."

Although Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, the above-quoted essay didn't begin circulating online until November 2015, was not published anywhere outside of unofficial social media accounts and low-traffic blogs, and has not been confirmed by anyone close to the founder of Apple.

Furthermore, after Steve Jobs passed away on 5 October 2011, his sister Mona Simpson remarked on her brother's final words while delivering his eulogy:

Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times. Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve's final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

While the above-quoted essay does not represent either Steve Jobs' final words nor remarks he made (in either oral or written form) at any time during his life, his biographer Walter Isaacson did record Jobs' expressing regret at the end of his life about how he raised his children:

"I wanted my kids to know me," Mr Isaacson recalled Mr Jobs saying, in a posthumous tribute the biographer wrote for Time magazine. "I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did." "He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That's what made him so great," he added. "Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, 'It's 10,000 times better than anything I've ever done'." It wasn't always thus. In the early stages of his career, Jobs, who was adopted, denied being the father of Lisa and insisted in court documents that he was "sterile and infertile". He acknowledged paternity when she was six, and they were later reconciled.

By Dan Evon

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.

Steve Jobs’ Last Words Were a Warning About the Pursuit of Wealth-Incorrectly Attributed!

Fact check: Commentary on wealth is falsely labeled as Steve Jobs' last words

The claim: steve jobs' last words were a commentary on wealth.

Steve Jobs’ last words were about his admiration of his family, not a critique of wealth, as a viral post claims.

A post that has been circulating in different forms since 2015 claims the Apple founder and billionaire died disillusioned with his wealth. 

“In other eyes, my life is the essence of success, but aside from work, I have a little joy. And in the end, wealth is just a fact of life to which I am accustomed,” the post claims Jobs said.

“At this moment, lying on the bed, sick and remembering all my life, I realize that all my recognition and wealth that I have is meaningless in the face of imminent death,” it goes on to say. “You can hire someone to drive a car for you, make money for you — but you can not rent someone to carry the disease for you. One can find material things, but there is one thing that can not be found when it is lost — life.

“Your true inner happiness does not come from the material things of this world. Whether you’re flying first class, or economy class — if the plane crashes, you crash with it.”

The post, made by Sergio Cardenas, then goes on to talk about the importance of seeking happiness, health and love in how you live your life over material possessions. The post has over 36,000 shares.

USA TODAY reached out to Cardenas for comment.

Fact check: Camping World CEO is misquoted in viral meme

What did Steve Jobs say on his death bed?

When Jobs died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer, his sister Mona Simpson spoke about his last words as part of her eulogy . 

She said, “With that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Jobs' final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them,” she continued.

“Steve’s final words were: 'Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.'”

Fact check: Ernest Hemingway quote falsely attributed to Joe Biden

Where did the other speech come from? 

No one who was close to Jobs has ever said the often-circulated essay was ever written or said by Jobs, according to a fact check by Snopes .

Snopes found the speech didn’t start circulating until 2015, four years after his death. 

The version being fact-checked in this article contains slightly different language than the one Snopes checked, but there are enough similarities that there is a clear thread between them. 

Fact check: NBA legend Larry Bird did not tell players to 'shut up and play the damn game'

Our rating: False

We rate this claim FALSE, because it is not supported by our research. There is no evidence Steve Jobs used his final moments to deliver a speech against materialism. Instead, a relative has recounted that he looked at those he loved for a long moment before saying “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” 

Our fact-check sources:

• Facebook post
• Snopes, Nov. 8, 2015,  "Steve Jobs Deathbed Speech"
• New York Times, Oct. 30, 2011, "A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs"

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

My Dad Belittled My Work For Years. Then I Received An Email That Told A Very Different Story.

Guest Writer

“Stop running naked through the streets, humiliating your family!” my dad emailed.

It was the eve of my birthday, and I’d just published a well-received, emotional New York Times essay about why I regretted never having children. After many friends and female students had let me know they’d found my words illuminating and helpful, I’d considered it a triumph. Now I stared at my screen, feeling like a failure who’d hurt the person I cared about most.

I was a happily married, popular teacher in my 50s who’d spent years in therapy with a paternal figure who’d helped me quit drinking and smoking cigarettes (a vice I’d shared with my real father). Yet now I morphed back into a little girl at the Michigan dinner table offering my opinion disagreeing with my brothers, shattered when my doctor father yelled, “Shut up, you’re stupid, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He’d always favored my three younger siblings, who were conservative Midwest science brains like he was. When I was a teenager, he hated my lefty politics, Bob Dylan albums, feminism, and penchant for provocative authors like Erica Jong and Phillip Roth. When I’d moved to New York to get my graduate degree at 20, he made fun of my confessional poetry, asking, “Ya gonna sell your poems on the sidewalk?” While initially impressed when I was paid for my humorous relationship pieces in women’s magazines, he’d sniffed that I was “freelance everything.”

“Your relatives aren’t your audience,” Dr. Winters insisted when I was 43 and Random House bought “ Five Men Who Broke My Heart ,” my sex, drugs and marriage memoir that they’d abhorred.

We’d spent hours analyzing how my father had emulated his own gruff Dad, my Grandpa Harry, who’d never forgiven him for not being a partner at “Shapiro & Son’s Window Shades” on the Lower East Side. He was the only Jewish parent in the world who wasn’t proud that his child had become a doctor. I feared my father had recreated his tumultuous relationship with his late older sister, Shirley, with me. She and my Grandma Yetta had died of breast cancer, one of the reasons he’d become a doctor in the first place. I looked so much like a young Shirley that when I posted an old family photo of her and my father on Facebook, the algorithm tagged me.

“You can tell your Dad that he can be proud of your accomplishment without loving your book,” my shrink told me.

My parents did fly in for my Soho launch party, though I’d overheard my cousin ask, “How are you holding up?” as if they were making a shiva call. Dad took to emailing, “We’re proud of the accomplishment.” I took to sharing a rule with my classes: “The first piece you write that your loved ones can’t stand means you’ve found your voice,” and as I kept publishing, I used a bio that said, “Susan Shapiro is the author of several books her family hates.”

Two years after he’d trashed my New York Times piece, I was surprised by an email from Olaf, my father’s doctor. “Your dad says you’re a best-selling author and generous writing professor who might help me,” he wrote.

Since my father was sick with a weakened heart and kidneys, I was on a plane, rushing back to Detroit to see him. Olaf wanted help publishing an essay. Confused and floored by the flattery from my cantankerous parent, I promised: “You fix my pop, I’ll fix your pages.”

Dad hated spending his 85th birthday as a patient at his old hospital. Though we brought cake and balloons, he was gray and listless. Worried, I texted Olaf, offering an editing session if he’d rush to my father’s room. I couldn’t weigh in on his treatment like my physician brothers. But Olaf could. Indeed, he discovered my father was being given the wrong dose of medication. He adjusted as I marked up his work. Dad was tickled when he later learned his favorite doc would be publishing his first essay in a magazine edited by one of my former students.

“What did you tell Olaf about me?” I questioned Dad after everyone else had gone.

“How proud I am of my daughter,” he answered.

“Why don’t you ever tell me that?”

“I am now,” he said.

I stayed for a few hours; it was rare to get time alone with my dad.

Sitting at the edge of his sickbed, I asked, “Why did you always say I was just like your sister, Shirley? Because I’m opinionated and not afraid to argue with you?”

“Because you’re sharp like her,” he said. “Shirley mostly fought with your grandfather. He wouldn’t pay for her college because she was a girl. It was especially unfair because Shirley was smarter than me. That’s why your mother and I swore all our kids ― girls and boys ― would get a great education. We’d go into debt if we had to.”

I was taken aback. Despite disparaging my creative ambitions, I recalled how he’d covered my tuition while I’d studied subjects he’d loathed so that I could find work I felt passionate about, with no financial burdens.

“Shirley’s illness and death were so tragic. I thought you were saying I was, too.”

“Of course you’re not tragic,” he told me.

Was that because my father had saved me, before I was even born?

“I’m sorry I was a disappointment to you,” I said quietly.

“What are you talking about? You stuck to your guns and became a big success.”

“I wish I’d given you grandchildren,” I confessed.

“I have a lot of regrets myself,” he admitted.

He’d never said that before.

“I should have kept teaching med school. But I was stubborn and my big mouth got me fired.”

“I have your big mouth and stubbornness, too,” I admitted. “Like Shirley.”

“It took me too long to make a good living,” he conceded. “I felt like a failure, switching jobs and moving your mother around so much before my career was solid, in my 40s.”

My father, a street kid who’d spent his teenage years carrying his father’s window shades up flights of broken tenement stairs, became a chief of medicine who adored his wife of 64 years, four kids and five grandkids, caring for his relatives, medically and fiscally. Seeing Dad as a prosperous powerhouse in our family’s rags-to-riches mythology, I was amazed that we’d both had a late-in-life inferiority complex.

After 19 days as a patient, Dad was strong enough to go home. I offered to extend my stay in West Bloomfield, but he needed some time and space to get reacclimated, he said.

Before leaving for the airport, I went to his den. He was sitting at his desk on the phone, wearing the black Nike tracksuit I’d bought him for his birthday, yelling at the insurance company about a bill they hadn’t covered. He was back! Overcome with relief, I started to cry.

“Don’t be sad for me, Susie,” he said. “Look, I’m 85. My wife, kids and grandkids mean the world to me. I have no regrets.”

“But at the hospital you told me all you regretted,” I reminded him.

“Oh, don’t believe any of that crap. They had me on too many drugs,” he insisted. “I got everything I wanted. I’ve had a great life.”

Thanks to my father, I had a great life too. I loved the way he withdrew his regrets as he stood up to give me a hug, not knowing it would be our last.

A few months later, before I had the chance to visit again over the winter holidays, my mother texted me to say Dad had been rushed to intensive care, in heart failure. She told me he’d recited Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” to the nurses and physicians, delirious from medication. I remembered when he’d first taught me poetry, testing me on stanzas. At three, when I’d repeated an entire poem he’d shared by heart, he’d kissed my forehead and said, “You’re so smart,” unwittingly sealing my fate. I thought for sure he’d pull through again. I was stunned when my oldest brother called to tell me we’d lost him.

At his funeral, I flashed to the night we’d attended a cousin’s wedding, after I’d finished graduate school. Dad and I both snuck out of the synagogue for a cigarette, our shared method of self-destruction.

“Why are you so against my writing career?” I’d mustered up the courage to ask him.

Buzzed on White Russians, he’d whispered, “You’re doing what I was afraid to.”

I knew he’d be thrilled that I’d helped Olaf find a publisher for his debut novel.

Susan Shapiro, a Manhattan writing professor, is the bestselling author/coauthor of books her family hates including “ Five Men Who Broke My Heart ” and ” American Shield .” This is an excerpt from ” The Forgiveness Tour ,” out in paperback in July. You can follow her on Instagram at @profsue123 .

Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected].

Popular in the Community

From our partner, more in huffpost personal.

The Truth About Steve Jobs' Last Words Before He Died

There's no doubt that Steve Jobs was one of the most influential figures of his time. The products that he helped pioneer at Apple , from the Macintosh computer to the iPhone, changed the shape of society. His vision for the future of technology has, in many regards, become the look of the 21st century as we know it. 

While Jobs' name and legacy have been immortalized, though, the man himself was all too mortal. As made clear by Walter Isaacson's posthumous biography , Jobs was a harsh, demanding figure, prone to anger and depression, who couldn't help but be a complicated figure in the public imagination: as much as Jobs could be petulant, shortsighted, and childish, he was also an honest visionary, whose blunt attitude led to an unprecedented volume of earth-shaking products. As a flawed, real human being, Jobs was also prone to the weaknesses of the human body, and so he spent his last decade of life battling pancreatic cancer, according to Biography , and died in 2011. 

Since then, there has often been speculation — and outright fabrications — regarding what Jobs said on his deathbed. 

The meme-worthy 'deathbed speech' of Steve Jobs isn't real

Steve Jobs was an important figure in technology history, but he wasn't always a person who others looked upon favorably. He was a complex figure with many flaws , to put it mildly. However, back in 2015, an essay circulated across social media, claiming to be Jobs' final deathbed speech, whereupon he apologized for all of his past behavior, and cautioned others to not follow his example. In the speech, Jobs allegedly told anyone reading it to treasure their family and friends, and that, "Now I know, when we have accumulated sufficient wealth to last our lifetime, we should pursue other matters that are unrelated to wealth ... should be something that is more important: Perhaps relationships, perhaps art, perhaps a dream from younger days. Non-stop pursuing of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me." The essay finishes with a sentimental treatise on how the only book that matters is the so-called Book of Healthy Life ... which, no, you won't find in stores. Duh.

It's all a bit soap opera-ish, to put it bluntly. Seriously, can you picture Steve Jobs saying this? Maybe at the end of a Disney movie, but certainly not in real life. Sure enough, Snopes debunked the whole thing soon after it arrived. That said, there should have never been a need to cook up a phony final speech for Jobs, because his actual final words are well-documented. 

Steve Jobs' final words were far more mysterious

When you're wondering what a famous person's last thoughts on life might've been, it pays to know who was in the actual room. As it happens, Jobs' sister Mona Simpson was there by his side, and she discussed the Apple titan's last statement when she was giving his eulogy, according to the New York Times . As she tells it, in Jobs' final moments of consciousness, he looked at his family, then stared past their shoulders into the great beyond behind them, and uttered the repeated phrase: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

What did this mean? Honestly, there's no way to know. Depending on one's spiritual beliefs regarding the afterlife, there are many ways to read into these words. Nonetheless, it's fascinating to ponder the mystery.

The great beyond

Now, if one wants to prove what Steve's final words meant, you'd first have to prove what really happens after death. Good luck with that. Humankind has been trying to figure that puzzle out for the past, oh, 200,000 years or so, and cooked up plenty of fun theories.

That said, Jobs' final words do hint toward something wonderfully ethereal and fascinating, which can't help but get the mind buzzing. In that regard, understanding Jobs' own spiritual views may be helpful: looking back on his life, he once said that his experimentation with psychedelic drugs were a transformative experience, and according to CNN , his travels through India led to him eventually converting to Buddhism. His wedding to Laurene Powell was presided over by a monk, Kobun Chino. While his overall belief system was complex, it was perhaps best summarized when, in an interview with Time Magazine , he stated that, "I believe life is an intelligent thing, that things aren't random." He also once stated that his big goal in life was to "put a dent in the universe." Now, to be clear, there are many details about Jobs' life that didn't particularly line up with his philosophies, most notably his oft-stated lack of philanthropic giving. Nonetheless, his beliefs were a huge, guiding force in his life, and one can only assume whatever he saw at the end — whatever it was that made him repeat "Oh wow" three times — it was somehow connected to all this.

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death

Author: Frederik Kaufman Categories: Ethics , Metaphysics , Historical Philosophy Word count: 987

Listen here ; video below

Most people think dying would be bad for them and so they fear it. Is that fear rational?

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) says no. He argues that death—as the permanent extinction of consciousness—is not bad, so we should not fear it. The Roman philosopher Lucretius (94- circa 55 BCE) agrees, and he defends Epicurus.

If Epicurus and Lucretius are right, then fear of death is irrational. But are they right?

1. Epicurus’ Argument

Death, Epicurus argued, cannot touch us because “while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.” Since death cannot touch us it cannot be bad. Fear is rational only for something bad. So Epicurus concludes that fearing death is pointless. [1]

To be clear: the issue is being dead, not dying, since while dying we still exist. Dying can be awful and so rightly feared.

2. Reaction to Epicurus

Common sense has long recoiled to Epicurus. Surely death is bad if it deprives us of the goods of life. Granted, if continued life would be terrible, then death might not deprive. But if it does deprive us of good experiences, then it is bad because it is bad to be deprived of any good. [2]

3. Lucretius’ Argument

This common sense reaction to Epicurus plays right into Lucretius’ hands. For if we say that death is bad because it deprives us of time alive, then when we were born also deprives us of time alive, since we could have been born earlier than we were (or whenever we began to exist). However, since no one fears missing out on time before they were born, they should not fear missing out on time after they die.

Lucretius writes:

Look back again to see how the past ages of everlasting time, before we were born, have been as naught to us. These then nature holds up to us as a mirror of the time that is to come, when we are dead and gone. Is there aught that looks terrible in this, aught that seems gloomy? Is it not a calmer rest than any sleep? [3]

4. Responding to Lucretius

If we concede that being born “late” is just as bad as dying “early,” then maybe we should lament both when we were born and when we will die. [4]

However, this is hard to believe and even harder to actually do.

Alternatively, even if our non-existence before birth and after death both deprive, maybe death deprives us of something we care about, whereas we are indifferent to time we missed before we were born. [5] That is, we could simply have a preference for the future. [6]

However, even if true, this preference merely explains why we care about missing future goods by dying when we will instead of the goods we missed by being born when we were. Lucretius’ claim is that our preference is irrational, since the two periods of non-existence are symmetrical, so we should have similar attitudes toward them. Lucretius can even agree that we are biased toward the future; that, he would say, is the problem!

5. A Different Answer to Lucretius

Here is a more promising response. [7] I might die later than I will, but I could not have been born earlier than I was. Anyone born earlier would not be me, because different gametes would produce a different individual. [8] If so, then I can rationally lament the one but not the other.

But here’s a problem: if particular gametes determine one’s identity, in vitro fertilization (IVF) shows how the same human being could exist earlier. [9] If the embryo from which a person developed were implanted earlier than it was, it seems that that same person could have existed earlier than she did.

The earlier IVF human being would indeed be identical to the later one, but the term “human being” is ambiguous between “human organism,” which is a biological concept, and “ person ,” which is a metaphysical concept. Permanent coma victims, for example, are obviously human organisms, but not persons in the sense in which you are a person, namely, as a center of rational self-awareness. Conversely, Superman, were he to exist, would be a person in that sense, though obviously not a member of our species .

So the embryo could have been implanted earlier, which would have resulted in the same human organism as the later implanted embryo, but would it have given rise to the same person ? [10]

We care about the details of our lives. Our concerns, memories, hopes, relationships, and all that makes our lives worth living matters to each of us. That is what death threatens. Call this our “thick personhood,” to distinguish it from the bare human organism shorn of one’s biographical life. [11] So even if an earlier existing human organism would be identical to a later existing one, that is not what matters to each of us. [12]

If I die tomorrow (contrary to fact, I fervently hope!), I can nevertheless easily imagine extending my established biography past tomorrow, but I cannot imagine my biography beginning earlier than it did. How, for example, could I have met my wife before she was born? Unless we can somehow push everything back in time in lock-step unison, our thick personhoods cannot possibly exist earlier than they do. [13]

We cannot be deprived of impossible things, such as the cake we ate yesterday. Since it is impossible for thick persons to exist earlier than they do, one cannot be deprived of time before birth. But it is possible to die later than one will, so we can be deprived of that time. [14] If so, this answers Lucretius.

6. Conclusion

So to return to the intuitive response to Epicurus: since death typically deprives us of good life experiences, that’s what makes it bad, thus justifying some appropriate level of fear. That’s what most of us thought initially, and it looks like we were right.

[1] Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” Principal Doctrines , Library of Liberal Arts, Russel Geer, tr., 1978. p. 54. For Epicurus, happiness (understood as pleasure) is the only thing that has intrinsic value , that is, pleasure is the only thing valuable for its own sake; it is the end with respect to which everything else is a means, and so it is the ultimate goal in life. Fear of death causes extreme anxiety, thus ruining our lives. This is no idle issue. How we face the prospect of our own death is perhaps the greatest quandary of the human condition. This applies to those who think death is annihilation and maybe even more so to those who deny it.

Lucretius, a committed Epicurean, expresses gratitude to his mentor for freeing him from the fear of death that afflicts so many people, causing them to lead desperate lives and to do awful things; On the Nature of Things , Bk II, p. 65, Cecil Bailey, tr, Oxford University Press, 1950:

Sweet it is, when on the great sea the winds are buffeting the waters, to gaze from the land on another’s great struggles; not because it is pleasure or joy that any one should be distressed, but because it is sweet to perceive from what misfortune you yourself are free.

[2] For development of this argument, see Thomas Nagel’s seminal article, “Death,” reprinted in Mortal Questions , Cambridge University Press, 1979. pp. 1-10. Many other philosophers develop the deprivation account, including Fred Feldman, in Confrontations with the Reaper , Oxford University Press, 1992; Ben Bradley, in Well-Being and Death , Oxford University Press, 2009; and Shelly Kagan, in Death , Yale University Press, 2012; and many more. The deprivation account is the most popular explanation for why death is bad, when it is bad. It is popular because it is intuitively correct, but like many seemingly obvious views in philosophy it requires more intellectual effort to establish than anyone ever imagined, as these books demonstrate. Death is a perennial topic for philosophy, but since Nagel’s article there has been a great deal of interest in the metaphysical and ethical questions surrounding death.

[3] Lucretius, On the Nature of Things , trans. Cyril Bailey, Oxford University Press, 1920, III. 927.

[4] Fred Feldman, “Some Puzzles About the Evil of Death,” Philosophical Review 100.2, April 1991 205-27 (reprinted in David Benatar, Life, Death, and Meaning, Roman and Littlefield, 2004, p. 234), holds that we should try to view our births in the same way we view our deaths:

There are, after all, two ways in which we can rectify the apparently irrational emotional asymmetry [between late birth and early death]. On the one hand, we can follow Lucretius and cease viewing early death as a bad thing for Claudette. On the other hand, we can at least try to start viewing late birth as a bad thing. My suggestion is that in the present case the latter course would be preferable. I think it must be granted that our emotional reactions toward pleasures lost by early death are quite different from our emotional reactions toward similar pleasures lost by late birth. If my proposal is right, this emotional asymmetry is irrational.

That the lateness of our birth could be as tragic as our untimely death is even harder to accept than Lucretius’ recommendation that we become indifferent to death.

[5] Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer, “Why Death is Bad,” Philosophical Studies 50 (1986) pp. 213-21, p. 219. Brueckner and Fischer think that we could be born earlier than we were, but since we have a bias toward the future, we are indifferent to goods that we missed by being born when we were. See Lukas J. Meier (2019) “What Matters in the Mirror of Time: Why Lucretius’ Symmetry Argument Fails,” A ustralasian Journal of Philosophy , 97:4, 651-660 for an account of what matters in pre-vital and post-mortem times.

[6] Fischer and Brueckner, “The Asymmetry of Early Death and Late Birth,” Philosophical Studies 71 (1993) 327-31; p. 328. appeal to a variation on a famous thought experiment of Derek Parfit’s that purports to show our temporal bias. (A “bias” is an irrational preference, since the idea of a rational bias seems incoherent.) Here is is Brueckner and Fischer’s version of Parfit’s thought experiment:

Imagine that you are in some hospital to test a drug. The drug induces intense pleasure for an hour followed by amnesia. You awaken and ask the nurse about your situation. She says that either you tried the drug yesterday (and had an hour of pleasure) or you will try the drug tomorrow (and will have an hour of pleasure). While she checks on your status, it is clear that you prefer to have the pleasure tomorrow.

[7] Nagel, ibid. p. 7

[8] For discussion of this claim, see Origin Essentialism by Chad Vance.

[9] Jeff McMahan (in “The Lucretian Argument,” in The Good, the Right, Life and Death: Essays in Honor of Fred Feldman . McDaniel, Kris (ed). Ashgate, 2006. Pp. 213-226, p. 216) asks us to:

[C]onsider someone who is the product of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Her parents wanted a child but not until they were older. But they worried that conceiving a child when they were older would carry a higher risk that their child would have a congenital defect. So they had IVF and had the resulting embryos frozen. They then waited 15 years before implanting the embryo that in fact developed into this person. This seems to be a case in which, if the parents had implanted this same embryo earlier, the same person would have had an earlier origin…If this is right, there are some people who could have come into existence earlier than they did.

The issues of this case lead to what’s called “the non-identity problem”: for an introduction, see The Non-Identity Problem by Duncan Purves.

[10] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Bk II, ch xxvii, paragraph 9. Locke distinguished sharply between the “man” or the human organism and the “person,” which Locke said is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.”

[11] For discussion of thick and thin personhood see Frederik Kaufman, “Pre-Vital and Post-Mortem Non-Existence,” American Philosophical Quarterly , 36, (1999), pp. 1-19.

[12] Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press, 1984. Ch 12, “Why Our Identity Is Not What Matters.” Parfit argues that our continuing psychological sense of ourselves is what matters, not whether from some metaphysical point of view there is just one self-identical entity. He shows this by means of highly original thought experiments whereby a person undergoes fission, resulting in two streams of consciousness; since there are two, they cannot be numerically identical.

[13] Travis Timmerman, “Avoiding the Asymmetry Problem,” Ratio 31/1 (2018) pp. 88-102; Timmerman argues that since the Milky Way could have begun earlier than it did, someone could be deprived of the time he or she could have had had the Milky Way formed earlier.

In response, I, following Nagel, argue that we must put some limits on how possible a possibility must be for its non-realization to count as a misfortune. So even if it is possible for the Milky Way to have formed earlier than it did, one is not deprived of that additional possible time simply because the Milky Way did not form earlier than it could have. To miss out on time alive by dying in a car crash tomorrow hardly compares with missing out on time alive because the Milky Way formed later rather than earlier. The former is clearly a misfortune, whereas it is hard to see the latter that way. See my “Coming Into and Going Out of Existence,” in Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying , Travis Timmerman and Michael Cholbi, eds, Routledge 2020.

[14] The sense of “possible” here may be controversial. (For an overview of the many meanings of “possible” see Possibility and Necessity: An Introduction to Modality by Andre Leo Rusavuk). It seems possible that the pedestrian might not have stepped off the curb when he did and into the path of the car that struck and killed him. If we deny that, then we must also abandon the idea of deprivation, since deprivation implies that there could have been a different outcome of events. That is, if we cannot be deprived of impossible things and it is impossible for things to turn out different than they did, then we cannot be deprived by the way things turned out.

Bradley, Ben, Well-Being and Death , Oxford University Press , 2009 .

Brueckner, Anthony, and Fischer, John Martin, “Why Death is Bad,” Philosophical Studies 50 (1986) pp. 213-21.

Brueckner, Anthony, and Fischer, John Martin, “The Asymmetry of Early Death and Late Birth,” Philosophical Studies 71 (1993) pp. 327-31.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, Principal Doctrines , Library of Liberal Arts, Russel Geer, tr., (1978).

Feldman, Fred, “Some Puzzles About the Evil of Death,” Philosophical Review 100.2, April (1991) pp. 205-27.

Kagan, Shelly, Death , Yale University Press, 2012

Kaufman, Frederik, “Coming Into and Going Out of Existence,” in Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying , Travis Timmerman and Michael Cholbi, eds, Routledge 2020.

Kaufman, Frederik, “Pre-Vital and Post-Mortem Non-Existence,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol 36, 1999.

Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , 1690.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things , trans. Cyril Bailey, Oxford University Press, 1920.

McMahan, Jeff, “The Lucretian Argument,” in The Good, the Right, Life and Death: Essays in Honor of Fred Feldman . McDaniel, Kris (ed). Ashgate, 2006 .

Nagel, Thomas, “Death,” reprinted in Mortal Questions , Cambridge University Press, (1979).

P arfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press, (1984).

Timmerman, Travis, “Avoiding the Asymmetry Problem,” Ratio 31/1 (2018) pp. 88-102.

For Further Reading

Luper, Steven, “Death”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/death/>.

Related Essays

The Badness of Death by Duncan Purves

The Non-Identity Problem by Duncan Purves

Personal Identity by Chad Vance

Origin Essentialism by Chad Vance

Happiness by Kiki Berk

Ancient Cynicism: Rejecting Civilization and Returning to Nature by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

The Ethics of Abortion by Nathan Nobis

Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing by Nathan Nobis

The Death Penalty by Benjamin S. Yost

“Can They Suffer?”: Bentham on our Obligations to Animals  by Daniel Weltman

Existentialism by Addison Ellis

Camus on the Absurd: The Myth of Sisyphus by Erik Van Aken

Hope by Michael Milona & Katie Stockdale

Is Immortality Desirable? by Felipe Pereira

Hell and Universalism by A.G. Holdier

Possibility and Necessity: An Introduction to Modality by Andre Leo Rusavuk

PDF Download

Download this essay in PDF.

Audio and Video

Listen here .

About the Author

Frederik Kaufman is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Ithaca College. faculty.ithaca.edu/kaufmanf/

Follow 1000-Word Philosophy on Facebook   and Twitter and subscribe to receive email notifications of new essays at 1000WordPhilosophy.com

Share this:

10 thoughts on “ is death bad epicurus and lucretius on the fear of death ”.

• Pingback: Ancient Cynicism: Rejecting Civilization and Returning to Nature – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
• Pingback: Happiness – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
• Pingback: Epicureanism: A collection of articles, videos, and podcasts. - The Daily Idea
• Pingback: Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update - Daily Nous
• Pingback: Is Immortality Desirable? – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
• Pingback: The Non-Identity Problem – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
• Pingback: The Badness of Death – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
• Pingback: The Death Penalty – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
• Pingback: Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
• Pingback: The Ethics of Abortion – 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Comments are closed.

• All Resources
• Teaching & Research
• Hogarth Press
• All Book Trade Businesses
• Archival Folders
• How To Use MAPP
• Funders & Partners
• Classroom Material
• Made in/by MAPP
• MAPP Publications

The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays

The Vanessa Bell illustration featured on the cover is reproduced with permission from the copyright holder. This item has not been made available with a CC BY-NC-ND licence and cannot be downloaded and shared.

Excepting the illustration the remaining jacket (and publication) is over 70 years old and is now out of copyright in the UK. Thanks are given to the Society of Authors literary estate holders of Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

This book cover is held at The University of Reading Special Collections as part of the Finzi, Gerald & Joy Library

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The captain's death bed and other essays

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

356 Previews

6 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station11.cebu on February 14, 2020

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath

By Mary Monck

‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck is a dying wife’s last words to her husband, pleading memories over mourning.

She was well-studied and had a great knowledge of literature worldwide.

Poem Analyzed by Sudip Das Gupta

First-class B.A. Honors Degree in English Literature

‘ Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck, as the title says, is a poem that talks about a wife’s last words to her dearest husband. The poem captures her fleeting emotions and dying wishes that she unfolds in her versification. Though there is only a request not to mourn her death in the end, the verse also presents her true love for her husband. The request comes from a heart that loves. The wife can’t see the eyes that have been giving her inspiration for a long time, reddened with grief. All she wants is a rejoicing epilogue of her life written in the book of love.

Explore Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath

• 2 Structure
• 3 Literary Devices
• 4 Detailed Analysis
• 5 Historical Context
• 6 Similar Poetry

‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck presents the poet’s love for her husband and through it, the poet implores him not to grieve her death.

‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck is a verse-letter. The poet dedicated it to her husband, residing in London. Whereas, the poet was at Bath and counting her lonely last days. The fear of death as well as the satisfaction of life is there in her mind. She knows she can’t surpass the oblivion but the feeling of love holds her back in her beloved husband’s thoughts. The more she thinks about him the more she becomes weak at heart. The thoughts of her grieving husband make her feel sad at the time of parting. For this reason, she implores her husband not to grieve her death. She requests him, “Rather rejoice to see me sake off life/ And die as I’ve lived, thy faithful wife.” On this sweet and brilliant note, she draws a curtain over her thoughts.

‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck is 22 lines long, and can be broken into 11 rhyming couplets . The poet doesn’t use a stanza division in this poem. However, each section of the poem contains a four-line unit that forms a rhyming quatrain .

The poet employs a closed couplet form and a regular rhyme scheme to express her love for her husband through this verse. Moreover, the last two lines which contain the main idea of the poem can be taken as a couplet that also has a regular rhyming pattern. However, the rhyme scheme of the poem is AABB and it goes on like this. There is only one imperfect rhyme in the poem which is in the third and fourth lines. Here, “friends” and “send” don’t rhyme.

The meter of this poem sticks to in iambic pentameter , resembling a heartbeat, complementing the poem’s intimate and reflective tone .

The rhyme scheme is AABBCCDD…, continuing in this pattern throughout. This consistent use of rhyming couplets gives the poem a rhythmic and soothing flow, while also naturally dividing it into quatrains and a final couplet.

Literary Devices

‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck begins with an apostrophe . Here, “thou” is none other than the poet’s husband to whom the poet dedicated this poem written on her death-bed . However, the poet uses several metaphors and personal metaphors in the poem. Likewise, in the second line, the poet metaphorically compares her husband to all her earthly joy. In the third line, the superlatives such as “tend’rest” and “best” makes this line an example of hyperbole . However, the hyperbolic expression isn’t used for mere exaggeration . It is for the sake of emphasizing the poet’s love for her husband. Moreover, there is an antithesis in the fourth line of the poem.

Apart from that, the poet also uses personification to compare death to a living being. By using the word, “face” in the eighth line the poet refers to the personified death. It is an example of synecdoche . In “all life’s fleeting joys are vain”, there are a personal metaphor and an epigram as well. However, there is a reference to heaven in the symbol of the sky, in the 16th line. The last two lines of the poem contain a paradox .

Detailed Analysis

Lines 1–4.

THOU, who dost all my worldly thoughts employ, Thou pleasing source of all my earthly joy: Thou tend’rest husband, and thou best of friends, To thee this first, this last adieu I send.

‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck introduces the poet and husband, dedicating whom the poet is writing this verse, in the first quatrain. In the first two lines, the poet refers to her husband as a source of joy in her life. In her worldly journey, there are only her husband’s thoughts in her mind. That is the magnitude of her love for her husband. However, the epithets used to glorify her husband make it clear that the person wasn’t a mere patriarch. He was tender in his duties for the wife as well as stood by her as a best friend. For this reason, being so close to death, she writes this poem for the first time as the “last adieu” to her husband.

Lines 5–8

At length the conqu’ror death asserts his right, And will for ever veil me from thy sight. He wooes me to him with a chearful grace; And not one terror clouds his meagre face.

In the second quatrain of ‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ , “death” as a conqueror asserts his right to the poet’s life. The tone present in this section, neither projects fear nor frustration with death. The person rather calmly accepts the abstract with a sigh. The sigh is natural as it speaks of the love that the poet has in her heart. However, in this section, the poet surprisingly compares death to a suitor. He is veiling her husband’s face in her mind’s eyes and wooing the poet with his cheerful grace. He has come to her, not for her hands, but her life. Moreover, the poet says, “not one terror clouds his meagre eyes” as death has confidence in what he does. There is no way out when it looks at a person with his conquering eyes.

Lines 9–12

He promises a lasting rest from pain; And shews that all life’s fleeting joys are vain. Th’ eternal scenes of heav’n he sets in view, And tells me that no other joys are true.

In this section of ‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ , the poet says how death convinces her to accept it. Here, the poet portrays the diabolic nature of death. In the poem, death shows the poet the eternal joys in heaven. But, he doesn’t tell the poet what she is going to lose. Her husband won’t be there to console her after her death. However, the last line of this section is in contrast with the second line of the poem. Her husband is the source of her “earthly joy” but death is showing her the joys in heaven. In this way, the poet presents her inner dilemma while she is on her death-bed.

Lines 13–16

But love, fond love, would yet resist his pow’r; Would fain awhile defer the parting hour: He brings thy mourning image to my eyes, And would obstruct my journey to the skies.

In this quatrain of ‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ , the poet places the eternal quality of love over the impermanence of death. For this reason, the poet says that only love can resist the power of death and it will soothe her in the “parting hour”. The calm acceptance of death can’t console a soul but love can. However, in the last two lines, the poet refers to the image of her loving husband that obstructs her migration to heaven. It is the most powerful mortal bond that none can resist even in the time of death.

Lines 17–20

But say, thou dearest, thou unwearied friend; Say, should’st thou grieve to see my sorrows end? Thou know’st a painful pilgrimage I’ve past ; And should’st thou grieve that rest is come at last?

In this quatrain of ‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ , the poet consoles her husband in a poetic manner. According to the poet, by death, her mortal sorrows will end and she will rest in peace in heaven. She has gone through many hardships both physically and mentally. Here, the poet uses the metaphor of “pilgrimage” to refer to her life’s arduous journey. However, at last, the poet requests her husband not to be sad if she dies in the near future.

Lines 21–22

Rather rejoice to see me shake off life, And die as I have liv’d, thy faithful wife.

In the last couplet of ‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ , the speaker refers to faithfulness as a wife to her husband. She is always constant in her duties as she was in the past. Moreover, even on her death-bed, she is committed to her dear husband. His tears make her unhappy. So, she wants her husband to “rejoice” in the moment and cherish the love between him and the poet. Then, she can peacefully migrate to nonentity.

Historical Context

‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ is a beautiful poem that talks about how much Mary Monck loved her husband. Mary Monck (1677-1715) was the first wife of George Monck of St Stephen’s Green, Dublin. While she was on her death-bed in 1715, she composed this verse for her husband. She wrote several other poems too and those were published after her death. However, ‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ was published shortly after her death under the title “Marinda. Poems and Translations upon several occasions, London” in 1716.

Similar Poetry

Like ‘Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath’ by Mary Monck, the following poems also talk about the love of a poet for her beloved.

• A Letter to her Husband, absent upon Publick employment by Anne Bradstreet – Here, Anne Bradstreet was in a similar condition and dedicated this verse to her husband.
• Sonnet 43: How do I love thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Here, Elizabeth Barret Browning talks about her love for Robert Browning , her beloved husband.
• Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy – Here, Carol Ann Duffy by referring to William Shakespeare ‘s wife, presents her passion for her beloved.
• The Heat of Autumn by Jane Hirshfield – In this one of the best autumn poems , Jane Hirshfield compares an innocent wife’s love to the heat of autumn.

You can read about Best Love Poems for Him here.

Home » Mary Monck » Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath

About Sudip Das Gupta

Join the poetry chatter and comment.

Exclusive to Poetry + Members

Join Conversations

Share your thoughts and be part of engaging discussions.

Expert Replies

Get personalized insights from our Qualified Poetry Experts.

Connect with Poetry Lovers

Build connections with like-minded individuals.

Access the Complete PDF Guide of this Poem

Poetry+ PDF Guides are designed to be the ultimate PDF Guides for poetry. The PDF Guide consists of a front cover, table of contents, with the full analysis, including the Poetry+ Review Corner and numerically referenced literary terms, plus much more.

Get the PDF Guide

Experts in Poetry

Our work is created by a team of talented poetry experts, to provide an in-depth look into poetry, like no other.

Cite This Page

Gupta, SudipDas. "Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath by Mary Monck". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/mary-monck/verses-written-on-her-death-bed-at-bath/ . Accessed 25 June 2024.

Help Center

Request an Analysis

(not a member? Join now)

Poem PDF Guides

PDF Learning Library

Poetry + Newsletter

Poetry Archives

Poetry Explained

Poet Biographies

Useful Links

Poem Explorer

Poem Generator

[email protected]

Poem Solutions Limited, International House, 36-38 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3NG, United Kingdom

Discover and learn about the greatest poetry, straight to your inbox

Unlock the Secrets to Poetry

Download Poetry PDFs Guides

Complete Poetry PDF Guide

Perfect Offline Resource

Covers Everything Need to Know

One-pager 'snapshot' PDF

Offline Resource

Gateway to deeper understanding

Get this Poem Analysis as an Offline Resource

Poetry+ PDF Guides are designed to be the ultimate PDF Guides for poetry. The PDF Guide contains everything to understand poetry.

• International
• Education Jobs
• Schools directory
• Resources Education Jobs Schools directory News Search

'Verses Written on Her Death-bed at Bath to Her Husband in London' by Mary Monck - Study Guide

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

16 March 2024

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

Here’s a complete study guide for the poem ‘Verses Written on Her Death-bed at Bath to Her Husband in London’ by Mary Monck.

Suitable for students of all levels, including those studying the 2023-2025 CAIE / Cambridge IGCSE and O Level Poetry Anthology (Songs of Ourselves, Volume 2, Part 4).

Here’s a FREE RESOURCE from the collection - download it to see if is right for you!

This digital + printable pdf + worksheet resource includes:

VOCABULARY STORY / SUMMARY SPEAKER / VOICE ATTITUDES LANGUAGE FEATURES STRUCTURE / FORM CONTEXT THEMES ESSAY QUESTIONS

Teaching or studying the whole collection? Take a look at our complete CAMBRIDGE IGCSE POETRY BUNDLE here!

Please review our content! We always value feedback and are looking for ways to improve our resources, so all reviews are more than welcome.

VIEW OUR SHOP for other literature and language resources.

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Get this resource as part of a bundle and save up to 53%

A bundle is a package of resources grouped together to teach a particular topic, or a series of lessons, in one place.

The Complete Cambridge (CAIE) IGCSE Poetry Bundle Vol.2, Pt4 (2023-25)

A set of study guides for every poem in the Cambridge IGCSE Poetry collection ( CAIE 2023-25, Songs of Ourselves Volume 2, Part 4). There are also tasks, themes and essay questons that are tailored towards helping students achieve the very highest level! Here's a [FREE RESOURCE from the collection ](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-12766593)- download it to see if the full bundle is right for you! Click here if you're looking for the other [Cambridge IGCSE poetry collection](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/the-complete-caie-igcse-poetry-anthology-bundle-part-2-2023-25-12751021) Poems included: After - Philip Bourke Marston A Leave-Taking - Algernon Charles Swinburne From An Essay On Criticism - Alexander Pope I Find No Peace - Sir Thomas Wyatt Lines Written on Her Death Bed at Bath to Her Husband in London - Mary Monck 'Marinda' Nearing Forty - Derek Walcott Now Let No Charitable Hope - Elinor Morton Wylie Rooms - Charlotte Mew Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples - Percy Bysshe Shelley The Character of a Happy Life - Henry Wotton The Forsaken Wife - Elizabeth Thomas 'Corinna' 'I Hear an Army' - James Joyce 'Rhyme of the Dead Self' A R D Fairburne 'Love in a Life' - Robert Browning 'Waterfall' - Lauris Dorothy Edmond Each digital + printable pdf resource includes the following: VOCABULARY STORY / SUMMARY SPEAKER / VOICE ATTITUDES LANGUAGE FEATURES STRUCTURE / FORM CONTEXT THEMES TASKS AND EXERCISES POSSIBLE ESSAY QUESTIONS **FREE** BONUS MATERIAL: *How to Understand the Mark Scheme: CIE / Cambridge IGCSE Literature (0475 / 0992)* *Assessment Objectives and What They Mean: CIE / Cambridge IGCSE Literature (0475 / 0992)* Please review our content! We always value feedback and are looking for ways to improve our resources, so all reviews are more than welcome. [VIEW OUR SHOP](http://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/ntabani) for other literature and language resources.

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

The Death Bed

By siegfried sassoon.

• The Death Bed Summary

In " The Death Bed ," a young man made to fight in a war he hated lies on his death bed. Sleep and death are closely related in the poem as the soldier drifts in and out of consciousness. In an extended metaphor, water carries him through this haze of dreams. Blind to the night, the soldier sees strange blots of colors. He hears the rain outside the ward as it gently soaks the woods.

When the soldier's pain flares like a wild animal, an unidentified person cares for the man. A personified death steps toward him. The speaker urges the reader to also care for the soldier, as there is still a chance to save him. Sassoon criticizes the military officials that remain safe on the sidelines while the young men they send to war die on the front lines.

But death chooses to take this soldier with him. They depart, leaving the silence of the summer night and an impression of safety in the veils of sleep. In the final line of the poem, guns thud in the distance.

The Death Bed Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Death Bed is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Death Bed

The Death Bed study guide contains a biography of Siegfried Sassoon, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Death Bed
• Character List

Find anything you save across the site in your account

It’s Mourning in America

By Cody Delistraty

In my childhood home, a modest, low-slung rectangle in eastern Washington, my mother was a bedroom away from me when she experienced her last moment. I remember standing in front of her, just after, feeling that I was watching a show or a movie, that this up-close experience was somehow false.

I had never seen death in person before. I had, however, seen it frequently on my phone’s screen, on my laptop, on TV, in movie theatres. So what was I looking at here? At my mother’s bedside, having never had the chance to confront serious loss in any substantive way, I was without comparison. In the following weeks, I struggled to accord what I’d seen with the world beyond our home. Looking around, it sometimes seemed loss and grief hardly existed at all.

Today, in the U.S. and the U.K., death is largely banished from the visual landscape. A century ago, approximately eighty-five per cent of Brits died at home; these days, it’s closer to twenty-five per cent, and around thirty per cent in America. Many of those deaths have moved to the hospital, an often sterile environment where, as during the pandemic, loved ones are sometimes restricted from visiting. When individual bodies show up in newspapers, magazines, and social media, they tend to be exoticized, people not like us . When they are familiar, they have “their faces turned away,” as Susan Sontag wrote ; their identity is eroded, reduced, until they are more concept than person. We see this form of not quite death so often that one can be forgiven for mistaking, as I did, the curated depiction for the actual event.

And then there is the stigma of grief—the idea, now rampant in American life, of closure. Most people are loath to linger in loss. We are expected to get back to work, back to normal. According to a recent survey, U.S. companies offer, on average, five days of bereavement leave, a remarkably brief amount of time to grapple with a death. (For the death of a “close friend/chosen family,” the number drops to a single day.) Typical mourning rites can seem to take closure to an extreme: at a funeral, loved ones may surround and console you for an afternoon, but we have few widespread customs that continue in the aftermath. This is in stark contrast to practices elsewhere—the Day of the Dead in Mexico; the Japanese Buddhist festival of Obon, which honors ancestral spirits—that prepare grievers to carry a loss for their entire lives.

In America, the appeal of closure may be traced to “ On Death and Dying ,” the 1969 best-seller, by the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, that outlined the “five stages” of grief, ending with acceptance. Kübler-Ross has been widely misread by the public: her original research was on how people coped with the prospect of their own death, not with the loss of another. As the social scientist Pauline Boss has pointed out, closure is a construct, something that can never fully be attained; even if we grieve in stages, there is no prescription for how to grieve, much less for how to neatly overcome a loss. Boss suggests that closure’s popularity is a product of America’s “mastery-oriented culture,” in which “we believe in fixing things, finding cures.” With my own grief, too, I imagined a solution. I wanted to mourn quietly, persistently, toward a goal, until the pain, even the death itself, was nearly forgotten.

Loss wasn’t always obscured or seen as a trial to overcome. Throughout the eighteenth century, in much of Western Europe, death was witnessed directly and with little fanfare, according to the French historian Philippe Ariès. Ariès was well known for “ Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present ,” his 1974 history of how the social construction of death changed over time. Observing an era in which mortality rates were much higher, he identified four distinguishing characteristics. The dying person was typically in his own bed. He usually had some awareness of his situation; he “presided over it and knew its protocol.” His family, sometimes even his neighbors, would join him at his bedside. And, while he was dying, emotions were relatively measured, the death being expected, to some degree already mourned, and broadly understood as part of the flow of time.

Although Ariès has been criticized, sometimes fairly, for an overreliance on literary sources and an idealization of the past, his core conclusion holds true: there was a social regularity—and nearness—to death that’s largely foreign to many today. (Ariès used the term “tamed death,” nodding to how mortality was at the forefront of public consciousness.) Even the trappings of mourning evinced this openness. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, grieving women generally wore heavy black outfits that included veils and bonnets; sometimes there were necklaces, or bits of jewelry that contained the hair of the deceased. Both male and female mourners often used special stationery with black borders for correspondence. (Over time, the borders would narrow, to show readers that the bereaved party was slowly recovering.) And “death portraits,” although creepy to contemporary eyes, were popular memorials, further elevating death’s presence in the cultural psyche.

In the nineteen-hundreds, though, our relationship to grief seemed to change, transforming from a public, integrated phenomenon to a personal and repressed one. Some of this may have been prompted by the First and Second World Wars, which resulted in such multitudes of dead—men whose bodies were often unrecoverable—that the old rituals were no longer tenable. Other reasons were political, serving the needs of power. During the First World War, for instance, American suffragists marched against the prospect of U.S. involvement, noting the immense loss of life and the struggle it would create for women left alone at home or widowed. The protest’s goal, per one suffragette, was to stretch “out hands of sympathy across the sea to the women and children who suffer and to the men who are forced into the ranks to die.” In the heat of August, 1914, women paraded through Manhattan in traditional black mourning clothes.

President Woodrow Wilson had run on an isolationist platform, but by 1917 the United States had joined the fray, and such demonstrations threatened his agenda. In 1918, conscious of the public’s perception of the war, he wrote to Anna Howard Shaw, the former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, asking that the suffragettes encourage women across the country to reframe their mourning as patriotism. Instead of mourning clothes, he suggested, women could wear badges bearing white stars, which “upon the occurrence of a death be changed into stars of gold.” At the time, the Nineteenth Amendment was in the balance, and Shaw, who understood the importance of Wilson’s support, obliged, asking her followers to dial back their public grief and change their dress. “Instead of giving away to depression, it is our duty to display the same courage and spirit that they do,” she said. “If they can die nobly, we must show that we can live nobly.” On July 7, 1918, the Times ran an article entitled “Insignia, Not Black Gowns, as War Mourning: Women of America Asked to Forego Gloomy Evidences of Grief.” (The article was pinned between two stories about the terrors of the war: “Mustard Gas Warfare” and “Need of Still Larger Armies.”) The Nineteenth Amendment passed the next year, with Wilson’s endorsement.

Across the Atlantic, Freud was rethinking mourning as a private pursuit. Perhaps grief was actually a form of “work,” he wrote in “Mourning and Melancholia”—and only upon that work’s completion could the ego become “free and uninhibited again.” Death continued to recede from the public square: Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay “ The Storyteller ,” notes how it had been relegated to the corridors of the hospital, where the ill and dying were “stowed away.” Silence, individualism, and stoicism became valorized, and talk of death and grief no longer belonged in daily interactions. “Should they speak of the loss, or no?” the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wondered in his 1965 book “Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain.” “Will the mourner welcome expressions of sympathy, or prefer a pretence that nothing has really happened?” In his book, which drew from a survey of about sixteen hundred British citizens, Gorer suggested that people who chose pretense were less likely to sleep well and have strong social connections.

Gorer, like Ariès, attributed this shift to “the pursuit of happiness” having been “turned into an obligation”: the challenging aspects of life were now framed as individual burdens, rather than shared setbacks. The quest for happiness has long been baked into the American psyche, but one can see its distortion in quasi-therapeutic concepts such as “putting yourself first” and “emotional bandwidth”—the notion that an uncomfortable emotion is an undesirable one, and that we should set firm limits on certain discussions of hardship, even with intimate friends. Add to that “self-care”—arguably the greatest marketing success of the twenty-first century, in which consumption is repackaged as a path toward well-being—and Ariès’s claim that we live in the era of “forbidden death” continues to resonate. “The choking back of sorrow, the forbidding of its public manifestation, the obligation to suffer alone and secretly, has aggravated the trauma stemming from the loss of a dear one,” Ariès wrote, citing Gorer. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”

After my mother’s memorial, after we scattered her ashes, I decided to run a marathon. I was still looking for proxies for grief, situations where an external accomplishment could solve my inner turmoil. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Not the running, not the hiking, not the strength-training regimen. Grief was a different beast, one that couldn’t be overcome through will power alone.

The historian Michel Vovelle challenged Ariès’s idea that “forbidden death” defined the West’s attitude toward loss, or that death had even become taboo by the mid-twentieth century. Vovelle believed that the historian’s job wasn’t merely to look at shifts in the past. “Why not look for these turning points in the present?” he wrote. Indeed, to look at the current moment is to see an unusual evolution, in which grief’s privatization has given way to the blossoming of a new hybrid form.

On social media, one often finds public grief that’s rooted in private interests. When a statesman or a celebrity passes away, or when videos of a distant tragedy circulate, expressions of mourning can sometimes seem to be a mix of sincerity and performance, an opportunity less to confront death than to strategically display one’s sympathies. Corporations issue statements of solidarity which are, at bottom, advertisements. (After the Boston Marathon bombing, the food site Epicurious tweeted, “In honor of Boston and New England, may we suggest: whole-grain cranberry scones!”) Crystal Abidin, an ethnographer of Internet culture, calls this phenomenon “publicity grieving”; it returns grief to the public square, but in strange, vaguely unnerving forms. When millennials began taking “funeral selfies” around 2013, the trend sparked a minor media frenzy, eliciting think pieces and advice articles, including one from a casket-making company.

The exploitative aspect of publicity grieving is obvious. Still, it’s notable that collective mourning is once again part of the texture of daily life. The sociologist Margaret Gibson is clear-eyed about the turn—death mediated by the Internet, she notes, is not the same as death being intimately known and accepted—but she also recognizes the ways in which grief has been normalized, its effects allowed to emerge once more in social interaction. One of her studies focussed on YouTube bereavement vlogs—videos, posted by young people in the days and months after they’d lost a parent, in which they forge apparently genuine bonds with the strangers watching, sharing their pain and showing how “mourning continues across a lifetime.” Elsewhere, initiatives such as The Dinner Party, a predominately online meetup for people who have experienced a variety of losses, provide a kind of “second space” for grief, somewhere between “normal” life and the formalized privacy of a therapist’s office. Even the funeral-selfie-takers seem—to me, at least—to possess motives more benevolent than voyeuristic self-promotion. Perhaps they wanted to share their sense of loss, but were unsure how to do so, in person, without feeling like they were an encumbrance. A frivolous form of photography may not seem commensurate with the gravity of death, but approaching the subject with some amount of levity and candor may be precisely what we need.

A decade on, I’m still figuring out my own grief. After completing the Paris Marathon, soon after my mom died, I didn’t run for several years. Lately, I’ve taken it up again, cutting curling circles through the park near my home. The point I’ve begun to look forward to is no longer the finish line, but the moment when I begin to hit a psychic and physiological wall. In the past, I might have stopped, gone home, downed some Gatorade. It was painful. Now I’ve found some satisfaction in the unease, in living within the feeling rather than blasting past it. I see that my feet continue to move, that my breath persists. Sometimes it overwhelms me, but then I look up and see, all around the park, others running, just as winded as I am, experiencing something of the same. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Summer in the city in the days before air-conditioning .

My childhood in a cult .

How Apollo 13 got lost on its way to the moon— then made it back .

Notes from the Comma Queen: “who” or “whom”?

The surreal case of a  C.I.A. hacker’s revenge .

Fiction by Edward P. Jones: “Bad Neighbors”

Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Stephania Taladrid

By Kat Tang

By Vinson Cunningham