"Last words," said Karl Marx," are for fools who haven't said enough." (Those were his last words.) Walt Whitman took a less sardonic attitude. "They are valuable beyond measure to confirm and endorse the varied train, facts, theories and faith of the whole preceding life." Whatever their import, a human being's final utterances—via deathbed, last will and testament, suicide note or tombstone epitaph—can range from the sacred and profound to the droll and defiant. There's something about the specter of death that makes you want to stick around a bit longer, and since this isn't always a feasible option, we take refuge in the spoken word, hoping that a verbal extension of our limited time on this planet will survive our worm-infested corpus delicti.

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