famous last words
What words would come if our final moment was recorded by the person who took our life?
“I’m not mad at you.”
Mystics and wise folks will tell us that death is not something to be feared: mirroring the beauty and hope of birth, the late poet John 0’Donohue speaks of the “the miracle of death” not as an ending so as much as a release and a return to the greater life from which we came.1
Those same mystics also tell us that for a few awakened ones who meet death with a greater sense of readiness, and in a way that gives them even a split-second moment of presence and awareness, there is a deeper release that happens in the time that immediately precedes our final breath. It’s a moment of presence and transcendence to say farewell, to unburden, to forgive, to let go, to ready one’s soul for the transition that is already under way.
I can’t say if I’ll be ready for that when the time comes, but I hope that I will be. I hope that the words on my lips will speak of gratitude and grace. I desperately hope that the last thought on my heart is not angry or resentful, but courageous and light.
And if those words happen to be something that others hear and remember, I hope that it will be a moment of witness: my life’s work, the spirit and soul within me, distilled into one word or phrase that does not harm, but heals.
This week we grieve the death of Renee Good, who was shot driving away from ICE agents in Minneapolis.2 From the videos we have all seen, it does not look to me that Renee had a sense that she was about to die. It also appears to me that she did not take seriously the agent’s willingness to use lethal, and likely illegal, force. She did not likely go into that exchange with words at the ready that would hang in the air after the gunshot, like mist, and yet her last words were recorded on the agent’s camera:
“I’m not mad at you.”
Which could not stand in starker contrast to the words of the agent himself, an adrenaline-laden string of expletives that followed the moment when he extinguished her life.
“I’m not mad at you.”
Now, for the first time in my life, I am wondering what I would say if an officer’s body camera recorded my last words. What words would come? Would they be powerful enough to outlast a news cycle? Would they be words that break past the waves of dishonesty and spin that would be deployed to muzzle me even after my death? Would they fall into the well-worn binary patterns of left v. right protest, or sound petulant or angry? Or would I leave behind something more generative?
I am grateful to Renee Good for leaving us with words that, because they don’t entirely fit any dominant narrative, manage to transcend anger and spin: I’m not mad at you. Words that allude to forgiveness and grace. Words that don’t yield power to someone holding a gun. Words that leave a space for healing.
What did she mean, exactly? We’ll never quite know. Yet she spoke with an enigmatic grace that will outlast the terrible moment we are in right now. Perhaps her words can invite those who mourn her loss to transcend the anger and fatalism that’s always a risk.
For those who would demean her, her words are are like exploding paint canisters that ruin an otherwise successful bank heist, that explode in the face of the thieves making them appear not just guilty, but clownish. Because they neither support the narrative nor react to it, her words are turning out to be a Trojan horse that violent men and women have accidentally let into their stronghold.
The death of Renee Good is a tragedy and I’m not pretending this is “worth it” just because her last words were meaningful. If we cannot trust federal law enforcement to obey the law, or our government to hold them accountable, then we have lost something profound. It is heartbreaking that I now need to have “the talk” with my teenagers: that if they’re protesting and the agents have guns, those agents could shoot without real provocation and without, it appears right now, facing consequences.
It is a dark moment, and it’s hard to find hope. Perhaps the best thing we can do is to sit with the reality of this, to accept that witness is becoming ever-more costly, and that speaking up can put our very lives at risk.
Resistance, then, includes preparing for the worst-case scenarios, and that starts not with scripting a mic-drop-worthy farewell so much as living a life that dismantles fear and resentment, and speaks not of anger but of love. So that in the moment when it counts, the words bear not bitterness, but grace.
Such words have the added bonus, with compliments to Renee Good, of short-circuiting the very source-code of hatred and violence.
This is from The Divine Imagination, a recording published by Sounds True.
From the video it’s clear she was driving away. It’s less clear whether it looked to the officer like she was driving away, but that’s why these things are supposed to be properly investigated.