We’re gonna talk about the rain, and I’m so glad that it’s actually raining, so that, that makes sense from what I hear. I’m the second linguist to ever be on this stage. The first one lost his voice. Um, I’m gonna try not to lose my voice. I might cry, but I’m not gonna. Who’s my voice? Uh, but that’s ironic that that happened to him because a linguist is someone who is interested in languages in the world and language in the brain and in social life. In my book. Bye-bye. I love you. I wrote about the first words of babies and the last words of the dying and the relationship between them and, uh, what remains when language fades. People ask me how I got interested in that topic. And I say that I remember holding my newborn son, uh, in my arms and listening to his coups and gurgles. And being aware that I was witnessing the beginning of something. It wasn’t language, not yet, it would become that. And 16 years later it’s still going. And it’s amazing. He was, he was reaching out, he was starting to interact, uh, and I felt privileged to witness that. But it also struck me that, um, I wouldn’t be there to see how his language ends. If in the way that it works out the way that it’s supposed to, I wouldn’t be there to see that. And just for some weird reason, this is the way that my brain works. Uh, I thought of his first vocalizations as a sort of memento Maori, uh, reminder that, that we all die. First and last words, you know, to the writer in me and the linguist in me. These were an irresistible pair of things to explore the rhythms of linguistic finitude and the linguistics of care. I mean, who wouldn’t wanna write about that? I totally did, but I wasn’t ready to deal with the death and dying part of that arc in any concrete way. But a couple of years later, I had a chance because I was foraging for wild blackberries, uh, in the woods in Maine where I lived at the time, and I, uh, encountered human remains that belonged to a woman, had turned out, uh, named Tanya, who had lived on the streets and had disappeared about a year earlier. Her story really came to shape my own because this discovery shocked me, just stopped me in my tracks, and I became obsessed with the question of who she was to me and how to care for the dead, particularly in that sort of circumstance where I didn’t know her at all. So I turned to the anthropology of death and dying and did a lot of reading, which led me to the work of people like, uh, Steven Jenkinson. And after years of this, I realized, you know, I think I’m ready to take on language at the very end of life in a concrete way. I wanted to know what really happens at the very end of life. What do people say and do? All I had in my head were things that probably a lot of people have if they don’t have the experiences that many of you do. I had the last words of famous people that you see collected in various places. I had what the movies show, and I had what my grandmother said to me, but as a linguist, I wanted to know, well, what’s normal and what’s the full range of things that people might encounter in those situations? It turns out that what happens is not necessarily what we hope will happen. So we hope for words and we hope for sense, and we hope for words that will make sense. We hope for some eloquence, something profound, maybe something witty. We hope for a message, we hope for something that provides connection, maybe some redemption. And we expect that the individual retain their linguistic powers long enough to be able to say something unique and spontaneous, unscripted about where they are and who they are at that moment and perhaps reflected, uh, reflecting back on their lives and. Sort of bringing it all to a close, like the final stanza of a poem. I compare things like that to rainbows, which do happen, but they’re not predictable. They happen according to a narrow range of conditions, which makes them fairly rare. You wouldn’t wanna plan for the rainbows. And I can tell you as someone who lives in a very wet country in Northern Europe, uh, that it’s smart to plan for the rain. You get up in the morning, you see if it’s gonna rain, you dress accordingly. And it’s, but it’s not just a matter of staying dry and comfortable. I wouldn’t wanna live in a city that planned for rainbows because that might make people susceptible to floods. So. What does the research tell us about the rain? When I looked at that with my linguistic hat on, one thing that I saw was that people tend not to lose their linguistic powers all at once, and sort of progressive and non-linear. As someone said, wildly fluctuating, they might say things, but those things might be banal. They might be bizarre and difficult to interpret, and it may only be in retrospect that you realize that something that was said was the last thing that they would ever say. Now a lot of this is, uh, a lot of what’s known about this comes from cancer patients, not about people dying on other trajectories and just as language speakers are diverse, so are dying language speakers. So there are patterns to what the deaf and multilinguals and the very young and people with dementia do that have yet to be mapped. But there’s some interesting research that we can use to build some expectations. Ground one is that people appear to tend to say what I call formulaic utterances. These are things that we learn as chunks of words. We store them in our brains as chunks. Uh, we say them a lot during our lives, and so they’re very easy for us to access in stressful situations. I love you. Thank you. I’m sorry. Am I dying? Nurse, uh, names and curses would fall into that as well. I found some other things that are useful and interesting. One is that only one half of people, these are cancer patients, uh, are capable of meaningful communication on the last three days of their lives. And that proportion drops to one third, uh, on the very last day of life. Also, one of the most reliable predictors of someone’s dying within three days is that they stop, uh, responding to verbal stimuli even when people. Stop talking, they will switch to nonverbals. So hand squeezes and other sorts of gestures, eye gazes and things like that. And in fact, many of the most moving stories that I heard were not about last words at all, but were about facial expressions and silently moving lips. So I like to think of it this way that our whole lives we’re sort of interacting with each other through a kind of window. And at the end of life, the structure that holds that window is starting to collapse. It’s starting to wobble. Um, and the space through which we have to enter that aperture through which we. Interact with each other. It’s starting to get smaller and smaller, and so we try to maintain the connection. We try to use the space that’s available, and that’s one of the reasons why there’s the shift from the verbal to the non-verbal. And in fact, that’s one thing that we do our entire lives. Humans are pretty good at switching, so we continue doing that until the end, as the window starts to collapse. There will be intermittent consciousness, which is exacerbated by the medications that people are taking. There will be moans which are difficult to interpret, delirium, which is difficult to interpret and silence a lot of silence. Contrary to many accounts, dying is not a particularly talkative time. And so the challenge there is to try to connect with each other through, uh, in, in the silence between, between the utterances. Maybe this is hard to hear. Maybe this is some, these are things that you already know or have experienced. For me, this was incredibly comforting to know because having the right expectations is where care begins, and I think that’s a form of radical bravery to claim. Setting the right expectations for another thing. It’s clear that we’ve been distracted by words. Yeah. And that personhood and language and consciousness are, can be detected in other things like the nonverbals and even in the back and forth of interaction in the conversation. When I set out to find out what really happens, I also discovered world religions that prescribe specific things for people to say. Sacred sounds prayers. So in Islam it’s a confession of faith called the shahara, which is also whispered to a newborn, uh, by the father. It’s the first thing the child should hear in Judaism. It’s a piece of a liturgy called the Shama. Hindus believe that people should hear sacred words, and if they say anything at all, it should be the name of a God. The point of all of this is to. Uh, unlock some desirable afterlife on the, uh, for, for the person who’s dying. But it also provides a measure of comfort to the family members. For me, it was important to discover that the expectation is not that people say something that’s individual, but they say something that everyone else has said. Everyone else in the community of believers. These are rainbows too, because it’s not really clear how many people get to perform the rituals, which have to be flexible for obvious reasons. But I would not have seen these ritual last words if I hadn’t looked outside the skies of my own culture. And last words, just like first words, have histories, they have bigger histories. And knowing those histories. Is a part of knowing how we came to think that they were the only way of to do things. Rainbows are important. All of that brings me back to the woman that I found in the woods. Nobody knows how she got there and because of the way that she lived, it’s not even considered a cold case. She died off the map outside of the ritual observances that mark someone’s biological death and someone’s, uh, social death. And the job fell to me, what is my role in trying to rewrite the balance? So I called the police, I saw a crisis counselor, I went to her memorial service. Were those the right things to do? Yes. Were they the. Were they, was that the, the entire set of right things to do? I wondered. So I met her family. I found out everything about her life. I wrote her story. Were those the right things to do? I mean, yes, I’m a writer, so that came very easily. But it turned out that that was not my job to bring her back to life with literary witchcraft at a different job. My job was to reconnect her. To communities of the living and communities of the dead, and to bring her to the place where she belonged. Perhaps I had been so struck by the discovery because I had actually found her lingering between states and my culture, unlike some of the cultures that people have described today. My culture. Had no rainbows to give me. So there I was a linguist and a father and a writer in the rain. So I fashioned a rainbow. And under that rainbow, I say that Tanya is one of my dead, I, I talk to her and on the, our day of the dead altar, we put. A photo of her in happier times and I say that she is one of our dead, even though she, we didn’t know her and she didn’t live in our neighborhoods or go to our book clubs and even though she wasn’t a soldier or a firefighter, she is one of our country’s dead there. There are rainbows that help us, and I believe that that is one. There are some rainbows that aren’t that useful. They come from a different time and now they’re obsolete. But I really do believe that this is a period in which we are all engaged in inspecting old rainbows, evaluating them, and perhaps inventing new ones where we need them. But I would offer that you can only do that when you go outside. And you reckon with the rain? Thank you.
