I don’t wanna be too harsh but I think that learning how to live from deathbed letters, especially the deathbed letters from people who were going to be sentenc

I don’t wanna be too harsh but I think that learning how to live from deathbed letters, especially the deathbed letters from people who were going to be sentenced to death is utter nonsense. The letters were going to be checked by the people that were killing you — the nazis in this example — so your letter was never going to be “fuck those utter pigs” or anything resentful of the people that were going to be your murderers because they would just be shredded or burnt or destroyed in some way. So this has a massive impact on the contents of the letters. Then there’s the unreliability of the narrator on the deathbed, I recently read a beautiful article about this about why you should not take advice from people on their deathbed or from yourself on your deathbed, the inherent bias you have will make you unreliable and the things you value and take for granted on your deathbed will not necessarily have been things you have always had but instead may be things you have worked hard for in your life. [1] Now that’s not to say their words are nothingburgers but when you have to wholly draw your own conclusions from inherently biased letters it starts to feel like we are all pretending to care more about these words because of the sacredness of death. No one wants to disrespect the dead, no one wants to say “wow, he must have been really losing it at the end” and that’s a given, not to be rude to dead people. That’s like punching down to the first degree. But like even things that would be considered light critiques or nice criticism don’t get to be said about take it or leave it bodies of work from dead people, because they are dead. On the one hand that’s a beautiful thing because let’s not start disrespecting dead people but on the other hand let’s keep it real. [1] https://www.hjorthjort.xyz/2018/02/21/the-deathbed-fallacy.html https://www.hjorthjort.xyz/2018/02/21/the-deathbed-fallacy.h...