Lecture: An Analysis of Memory Part 1 (1951)

The point is that as you start to drift down toward death, you get into these automatic response mechanisms. Way down at 2.0 you start to get into anger and so forth where your survival is badly threatened, and you try to destroy. Then you become afraid, and then you decide you have lost it all anyway. Then you become apathetic and they call up the local undertaker. People seldom do that for themselves; they leave it up to other people even to bury them, which I think is remarkable.

By the way, down in the South I was talking to an old lady, and she was very, very proud: She had decided that she was going to live a couple more years. And the reason she had to live a couple more years was that she was going to have one of the biggest funerals that they had had down there in a long time! She had a tombstone bought and her plot bought and everything; she was all set. She was going to have a coffin with silver handles–silver plated, anyway. She had a very progressive, healthy attitude. I don’t think she is dead. I think twenty years from now I will go back to Savannah and I will find that the undertaker is still taking payments off her.¹

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