Goodreads asked Lisa Smartt:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Lisa Smartt I studied linguistics at UC Berkeley and was trained to seek patterns in language, no matter how unintelligible the language is. So as my father was dying, and I noticed fascinating shifts in his language, I wrote down what he said and began to watch in wonder as patterns emerged.

My father was a vocal skeptic, so I was stunned when he described seeing angels as he was dying. One day he announced, “Enough…the angels say enough…only three days left.” Indeed, three days later he died. I noticed that he began to speak in highly metaphoric and nonsensical language, with unusual use of prepositions, saying things like, “I am crossing up. Help me get down from here,” and frequent non-referential language such as, “This is very interesting. I have never done this before.” My questions about my father’s final words led me to wonder if what I witnessed occurred in the language of others at the end of life, so I established the Final Words Project (www.finalwordsproject.org to find out.

flag