This succession of recordings document the final day of my aunt’s life. While still conscious, I recorded our conversations without her consent. The authenticity of the dialog displays perfectly the relationship we all had with one another. The fear of death was non-existent. The joy of a family together seemed to dispel any sorrow. That afternoon was one of considerable mirth. These are her last conversations before she went under the spell of morphine. That night, I stayed for over an hour and talked to her as she slept and struggled to breathe. She died twenty minutes after I left the hospital.

Diane Smith displayed some unique qualities when facing death. One of those qualities was humor. Being a drama teacher, comedy was no doubt something she regarded as a virtue.

The most important quality I witnessed from her was gratitude and the Nietzschean concept of amor fati, meaning love of fate. The philosophy requires a person to see all aspects of their own personal suffering as not only necessary, but worth loving, seeing it as a chance to overcome obstacles and continue the process of becoming. Therefore, Diane didn’t regret being in the hospital because otherwise, she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to observe humanity at its best. She defined those that worked in healthcare as the “salt of the earth.” Yet, it wasn’t just the doctors, nurses, and caregivers she described as being worthy and virtuous, but also the janitors and cooks. This is how she saw her own profession as an educator.

Diane Smith was an avid reader of Goethe. She was inspired by Goethe’s ability to transcend the dullness of life and turn the experience of living into art.

Rüdiger Safranski, a biographer of Goethe, stated that, “Goethe was convinced that the inner goal-directedness of active natures—their entelechy—was not used up at death. If the world was as it ought to be, then an unspent entelechy should be given a further field of action. Of course, not everyone could hope for such a thing. You needed to have something within you worth continuing.”1

Goethe’s concept is perhaps metaphorical in that in order for potential to carry on after death, the wisdom of the dying individual has to be inherited.

1 Rüdiger Safranski, Goethe Life as a Work of Art (Liveright Publishing Corporation 2017), Chapter 29 p 463