Laura's Words at the End

“The words Laura spoke to Aldous as he died had been written in his own novel two years before. He thought of everything.”

Aldous Huxley's final novel, Island (1962), contains a scene in which moksha-medicine is given to a dying person, and the guide speaks to them through the passage. The words were written by Huxley as what he thought the right words were.

On November 22, 1963, Laura Huxley used those words. She had given Aldous LSD that morning, as he had requested in writing when he could no longer speak. She spoke to him for several hours as his breathing changed and finally stopped.

Huxley had written the template for his own death in his final published work. He had thought, in his usual systematic way, about what dying with LSD should look like, and had put the conclusion in a novel two years before he needed to use it.

This is either moving or calculating, depending on your disposition. It is both. Huxley was a man who thought about everything, including how to die, and who had the unusual advantage of having found, in his late fifties, a substance and a partner willing to implement what he had worked out.

Laura's letter to Osmond, written within days of Aldous's death, is the final letter in a correspondence that began with Osmond's mescaline session in 1953 and ended with Aldous's death in 1963. Ten years. The correspondence produced a word, a clinical framework, three books, and a blueprint for dying.

Sources

• Huxley, Island (1962)
• Laura Huxley, This Timeless Moment (1968)