intense suffering, he acknowledged that “one of these mornings I shall be
slipping away from you forever.”^72 And possibly forgetful that he had once
famously compared his proposed leap to immortality to that of “a noise-
less patient spider,” he switched animals and said, “It would be a satisfac-
tion to know how the cat was going to jump.”^73 But he preserved his
equanimity to the last. When his devoted housekeeper Mary Davis asked
him, during a period of extreme pain, “How goes it, Mr. Whitman?” he
replied, “I’m having a hard pull, Mary.” “I hope you will pull through all
right,” she said; and he answered, “It will be all right either way.”^74 He
died March 26, 1892, having held out against a battery of diseases: chronic
digestive ailments, paralysis, pleurisy, pulmonary and abdominal tubercu-
losis, nephritis, gallstones, cysts, meningitis, and the almost complete
collapse of his lungs.^75 Lying immobilized in bed, his last words, ad-
dressed to his attendant Warren Fritzinger, were not the prophetic utter-
ances of a dying saint but only a request to have his helpless body turned
or lifted again. He had told Traubel that he felt like giving “my body,
my corpse” to be dissected after he died and that he was also “disposed”
to being cremated. In the meantime, however, he had set aside consider-
able money and, with the generous assistance of Thomas B. Harned, he
was able to order a six-hundred-square-foot tomb—an “Egyptian”-style
mausoleum—on what he boasted was the prettiest lot in Camden’s Har-
leigh Cemetery. He had made provisions for members of his family to be
entombed there as well.
Whitman had expressed the wish that his death be properly observed.
He told an English journalist that he admired the London Times’s dig-
ni¤ed obituaries of statesmen and literary ¤gures, hinting that he would
like to receive similar treatment when he died. His ideal write-up, he
told a reporter in 1890, would be modeled on “The Carpenter,” William
Douglas O’Connor’s thinly disguised saint’s legend about Whitman,
which the poet called the best “article” about him ever written.^76 Never-
theless, he might have been pleased by the way the press treated the news
of his death. As the most photographed American poet of his generation,
his face and his name (if not necessarily his poems) were widely recog-
nized. The press coverage in America and in Great Britain was impres-
sive and often insightful.^77 And the crowd of friends and neighbors who
came to view his body, ¤lling his house and the street outside, testi¤ed to
his popularity and to his status as a celebrity. At least a thousand people,
many of them the laboring folk to whom the 1856 edition of Leaves of
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 239