WIVTHEN WHAT?hat will it be like, our last moment alive? The chances are that we won’t be alert enough to notice
it. Our doctors will try to make it as easy as possible, so we may not be conscious when we finally
slip away. But suppose we are. Suppose we are aware till the very end, will we notice it? Will we know
it is the final moment? Will there be any sense of pulling up anchor and casting off? There is an old poetic
tradition that imagines death as a sea journey. In Greek mythology, everyone had to pay Charon the
ferryman in order to cross the river Styx, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Other poets have used the same metaphor. To describe the moment of death, Tennyson used the image of
crossing the sandbar to catch the tide where the river meets the sea:
. . . such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.44
it. Our doctors will try to make it as easy as possible, so we may not be conscious when we finally
slip away. But suppose we are. Suppose we are aware till the very end, will we notice it? Will we know
it is the final moment? Will there be any sense of pulling up anchor and casting off? There is an old poetic
tradition that imagines death as a sea journey. In Greek mythology, everyone had to pay Charon the
ferryman in order to cross the river Styx, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Other poets have used the same metaphor. To describe the moment of death, Tennyson used the image of
crossing the sandbar to catch the tide where the river meets the sea:
. . . such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.44
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