Last Letters
Think about death much? Just wait...
Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a Daniel Brumstetter essay in Aeon from September 2025
Military members often write last letters to their loved ones they don’t want those people to see, because they were goodbyes; I did. Left it in my pack like the other guys did; still do, probably, hoping that there’s enough left of the letters to be sent home with whatever’s left of their carcasses. But this bit mostly contains the last letters written by Frenchmen about to be executed by the Nazis.
If I were a maker of books, I would make a register, with comments, of various deaths. He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.
Michel de Montaigne
A last letter is uniquely personal, yet there is a universal feel to them, almost as if they paint a naked portrait of the human condition. Last letters peer into the souls of those confronting death. They aren’t like everyday letters, diaries, memoirs, political tracts or philosophical treatises because of the urgency that shapes the act of writing. The authors know they will not have another chance to say what they must say.
Use your imagination.
Dawn breaks on what you know is the last morning of your life. A prison guard hands you a blank sheet of paper and a pen hours before your execution. To whom do you write? What do you say, knowing this is your last chance to say it? Do you soften the blow for your kids?
I can give no longer any further testimony of my affection than this letter…Colvert will never again see his Plouf, nor his little Plumette. He is leaving for a big, big journey,
Robert Beck
How about your parents?
They are going to rip me from this life that you gave me and that I clung to so.
Jacques Baudry
Or your lover? Here, you can be deeply philosophical, with death no longer on the horizon. The moment has been decided, and its arrival is imminent and irrevocable.
Be courageous, ma Cherie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.
Huynh Khuong An
To read these last letters is to take a journey deep into the world of emotions at the very frontier of living and dying. In one’s last moments, superficiality cuts away, revealing something meaningful and deep about the human condition.
In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot.
Montaigne
These last letters tell us what this something at the bottom of the pot is.
As I prepare for this last mission, I am a bit homesick...Mother and Dad; you are very close to me, and I long so to talk to you. America has asked much of our generation, but I’m glad to give her all I have because she has given me so much.
Arnold Rahe, USAAF, 1943
Do we realize, scribbling these last lines, what these words will mean to our loved ones? How much to we care? Should we be bitter? Sad?
This evening, I think of your sweetness, your kindness, of our sweet moments, those from long ago and those of yesterday, know well, my darling, one could not love you more than I did…And I will fall asleep with your sweet image in my eyes and the taste of our last kisses that are not that distant, my sweet friend, my gentle little Lienne. Be sensible ... Be reasonable. Love me, for a long time yet…I kiss passionately your photograph…the one from Luchon in which you are wearing flowers.
Georges Pitard
Or should we just remember those best of times we had? Those people will read these letters in moments of infinite sadness; leave them with the good and leave out the bad. But make sure to leave them.
I dreamt a great deal, this last while, about the wonderful meals we would have when I was freed…You will have them without me, with family, but not in sadness…I relived ..all my travels, all my experiences, all my meals…It is 8 am, it will be time to leave. I ate, smoked, drank some coffee. I see no more business to settle.
Daniel Decourdemanche
As I remember it, my last letter to Mom was a lot like this last one, but I wrote it in 1974, so I really don’t recall that well. I talked about her, my sisters, my step-family, my life. I mostly recall how I ended it.
Just remember, Ma; I volunteered for this job.
John D. Beatty
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
Ned Steele knew every letter, every diary entry he wrote in France and Flanders could have been his last, yet he tried to keep that certainty out. It usually worked; it didn’t always.
And Finally...
On 20 June:
451: The battle called Catalaunian Plains near modern-day Châlons-en-Champagne in northeastern France took place between Western Roman and Visigothic forces led by Flavius Aetius and the army of Attila the Hun. The all-day brawl halted the westward Hun advance into Gaul.
1949: Gertrude “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran shocks the crowd with her visible and frilly underwear during match play at Wimbledon, London, England. While her outfit met the all-white requirements, apparently the tournament didn’t think to regulate women’s skirt lengths.
And today is NATIONAL AMERICAN EAGLE DAY, commemorating this day in 1782 when the US Congress approved the Great Seal of the United States, opting for the bald eagle instead of the turkey (Franklin’s suggestion) as the symbol of the country. If it had gone the other way, would we be calling those people “eagles?”
This is very moving. It shows heroism in a different light, but heroism all the same.