The doctor used the term “angina pectoris,” which has a theological sound, like misericordia. Now I do.Īnd now they say my heart is failing. I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. It’s a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn’t too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. I’ve lived in this one most of my life, and I’ve visited in a good many others, because my father’s friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I don’t know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. I’ll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I’ll probably keep it to myself. If you’re a grown man when you read this-it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then-I’ll have been gone a long time. It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything.

I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you.

I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.

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