The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [136]
James had no opportunity to gather life-affirming messages from the spirit world for his ailing friend. Myers had contracted double pneumonia by the time he arrived in Rome; he was struggling to breathe, fighting such intense chest pain that James was called upon to act as a doctor as well as friend. He administered morphine instead of messages of renewal.
With a more practiced Italian physician on the case and visitors banned from the sickroom, the Jameses were left to entertain Evie and to send Myers notes of encouragement: “I think of you all the time patiently undergoing this ordeal, and my sense of human nature’s elevation rises,” James wrote. He told Myers not to worry at all about his unfinished projects. Even as he stood by, James was editing a paper Myers had prepared on Rosina Thompson, which described a visit from Annie Marshall (cloaked in anonymity) and a detailed conversation with a spirit who sounded a lot like Edmund Gurney.
James also promised to see Myers’s book-in-progress, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published—even if he had to finish writing it himself. But he assured Myers that he expected his friend to be shortly back at work, the crisis “just a memory.” Myers didn’t argue with such optimistic predictions. He lay without complaint, asking only that his favorite poetry and philosophy books be read to him. Finally, with death imminent, the doctor allowed him company. His wife and friends sat by him, reading loudly over the harsh gasps of his breath.
He died on January 17, 1901, not six months after they had buried Henry Sidgwick. “His serenity, in fact his eagerness to go, and his extraordinary intellectual vitality up to the very time that the death agony began, and even in the midst of it, were a superb spectacle,” James wrote to Nora Sidgwick.
The only odd thing was the death itself. Myers seemed to have choked to death, which was highly unusual for the type of pneumonia that he had. Both James and Myers’s doctor in Rome were puzzled by it, the Italian physician saying the fatal illness “behaved in a way that he had not seen in 1000 cases.”
It led James to ponder, once again, on the power of that prophecy, that message from Mrs. Thompson that Annie Marshall was waiting for her Fred, expecting him to join her soon. Had it been a rare instance of clairvoyance, or, as he suspected, had it come true because Myers had willed it to do so?
“IS THERE GOING to be any difficulty about poor Mrs. M? I mean about the degree of knowledge or ignorance she may possess of the A-Control,” wrote William James to Oliver Lodge, in a carefully cryptic exchange in March 1901.
Their private discussion occurred at a time when attention was focused on a much more visible, news-making death. On January 22, five days after Myers succumbed, England’s Queen Victoria had died at the age of eighty-one, ending a reign that had lasted more than sixty years. Her eldest son had since been named Edward VII, king of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, and Emperor of India.
Lodge and James were more concerned with the legacy of the late Fred Myers. The “A-Control” was the spirit of Annie Marshall, carefully documented by Myers, in sittings with both Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Piper. In addition to those transcripts, their friend had also written a brief, privately published autobiographical monograph, which told of his longing for Annie and his efforts to find her.
“It is a delicate business, that; also for the children,” James continued. “Inevitably every thing will leak out, unless there should be a conspiracy of silence more efficiently carried out than seems possible.” He recommended being honest with Evie from the