A few days ago, I wrote about Robert Louis Stevenson. Through his writings, he was my childhood friend. Through mine, I hope he would consider me a fellow writer. But with only ten minutes to share something about him, I never got to what I like most. It is his epitaph.
Stevenson died of tuberculosis in Samoa, on December 3, 1894 at the age of forty-four. According to A Concise Treasury of Great Poems, “sixty natives carried him to a peak on the Pacific, and there a tablet was placed carved with the lines which Stevenson always intended as his epitaph.Under the wide and starry sky,
Epitaphs are the final words about a person that Posterity reads years down the road. I haven’t chosen mine yet. I only wish I’d penned Stevenson’s verse first. Failing that, I may have to resort to:
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here lies he where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
RLS, may I join you?
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