Ben lived for thirty-one months to the day after the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention. His mind remained sharp, but his body was, like an old house, beginning to creak and buckle. The plumbing was acting up too. “People who live long, who will drink of the cup of life to the very bottom, must expect to meet with some of the usual dregs,” he said. That is a bracingly positive take on a process I have always associated only with decline and loss. At the same time, Ben is realistic. He doesn’t deny the bitterness of the dregs, but rather than viewing them as an injustice sees them for what they are: the natural outcome of a long and useful life.
Considering all the maladies that can afflict the human body, Ben said, he was lucky to suffer from only three incurable ones: the gout, the stone, and old age. He did not dwell on his sundry aches and pains. He recognized his illness for what it was: an exit ramp “kindly intended to wean him from a world, in which he was no longer fit to act the part assigned to him,” said his physician, John Jones.
Franklin knew we don’t own our bodies. We merely borrow them for a while. They may give us pleasure and help us do some good in this world, but “when they become unfit for these purposes and afford us pain instead of pleasure,” nature supplies a way out. “That way,” said Franklin, “is death.”
We know this intuitively. We willingly choose a “partial death,” as Franklin called it, when amputating a mangled limb or parting with a diseased tooth. Death is merely the logical extension of this mortal calculus. In the end, concludes Franklin, we are not our bodies: “We are spirits.”
In the time he had left, Ben focused on what he could enjoy: “reading or writing, or in conversation with friends, joking, laughing, and telling merry stories.” He added a three-story wing to Franklin Court, including a dining room that could seat twenty-four and his pride of place: a library “lin’d with books to the ceiling.” It was a rare rash act from the typically cautious Franklin but, as he told his sister Jane, “we are apt to forget that we are grown old, and building is an amusement.”
Repose, at long last. Surrounded by his inventions and the numerous honors bestowed upon him, Ben took stock of his life. It was long, no doubt, but was it truly useful? He wondered aloud “whether I have been doing good or mischief.” He didn’t dwell on that question for long, though, for he knew it was not for him to decide. Only others, peering backward, are qualified to take the measure of a life. “I only know,” said Franklin, “that I intended well, and I hope all will end well.”
Intended well? What an odd statement coming from a man who placed so little value on intentions and so much on results. Was this a change of heart, I wonder, a deathbed conversion to the virtues of good intentions? And might it signal a larger conversion? Was Benjamin Franklin, so critical of scripture and the clergy, now banking on an afterlife?
When his friend Ezra Stiles, a minister and president of Yale, solicited Franklin’s thoughts on religion and, in particular, the afterlife, Franklin’s reply was characteristically sly. “It is a question I do not dogmatize upon,” he said, “having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.” Classic Ben. Witty, in the best sense, it also points to one of his core principles: Experience trumps theory. Every time.
To other correspondents, Ben embraced the prospect of life after death. Drawing on his electrical experiments and especially his greatest discovery, the law of conservation of charge, he notes that nature doesn’t destroy or waste anything, “not even a drop of water,” so why would she annihilate souls or waste millions of minds? It makes no sense. That is why, concludes Franklin, “I believe I shall in some shape or other always exist.”
Back at Franklin Court, I traverse a brick-lined entrance and a sign informs me Franklin used to walk the same route to his house. I notice an illustration depicting Market Street and its explosive growth from Franklin’s arrival in 1722 to his death in 1790. When he arrived in Philadelphia, people still recalled when settlers lived in caves along the Delaware River. By the end of his life, Philadelphia was a thriving scientific and cultural capital, the Athens of America.
I notice an oval plaque on the ground and stoop to read it. “Benjamin Franklin Privy Pit. 1787.” The sign could have just as easily read: “Ben Franklin shat here.” Too bad. Ben would like that.
Spotting a bench, I sit under a mulberry tree, just like the one Franklin liked to sit under during the warm Philadelphia summers. I close my eyes and try to picture Benjamin Franklin’s final days. It was April, the season of rebirth. In the eighteenth century, a time of rapid, unsettling change, people looked to the seasons as a comforting metaphor. Seasons change, but they don’t change randomly. There is an order, a reassuring predictability, to the cycle. Franklin was attuned to the seasons, the flux of all things. One of his favorite poems was “The Seasons” by James Thomson. It “brought more tears of pleasure into my eyes than all I ever read before,” he said.
Franklin believed anything worth doing was worth doing with others, and this predilection extended to death. He did not die alone. At his side were his daughter, Sally (“the comfort of my declining years”), a brood of grandchildren, and his old friend and protégé, Polly Stevenson.
One day, Polly found Franklin “in great agony.” When the pain subsided, she asked if she should read to him. Yes, he said, so she picked up a book of poetry and turned to Isaac Watts, one of Franklin’s favorites. She thought it would lull him to sleep, but instead, “it roused him to a display of the powers of his memory and his reason.” He recited several of Watts’s poems verbatim, and reflected on their sublimity. I see why Franklin liked the English poet. A Congregational minister who wrote a book on logic, Watts, like Franklin, toggled effortlessly between head and heart.
In his final days, the Old Conjurer kept everyone guessing. He would slip into a torpor and then regain his strength, buoying hopes. One day, Ben sat bolt upright and asked that his bed be made up so that he might “die in a decent manner.” Sally told him she hoped he would recover and live many years longer.
“I hope not,” he replied calmly.
Shortly afterward, Benjamin Franklin breathed his last breath, marking the end of the longest and most useful of lives.
I arrive at the Christ Church Burial Ground at Fifth and Arch Streets on a pleasantly cool spring day. I pay my five dollars and enter a small, leafy cemetery. Ben’s grave is located in a corner, near a busy intersection. Of course. A city boy to the end.
The marble tombstone reads simply, “Deborah and Benjamin Franklin, 1790.” Scattered on top are a handful of pennies, along with a few quarters and crumpled dollar bills. It’s a tradition no doubt born of the famous though oft misquoted line about “a penny saved is a penny earned.” (Ben actually said, “a penny sav’d is a penny got.”)
Across the street is a massive gray bunker of a building. What is that soulless monstrosity, I wonder? I look more closely and see the sign: “United States Mint.” Poor Ben. Even in death, he can’t escape his monetary reputation. I don’t think he’d fret about it. He knew who he was. As he said, dirt sticks to mud walls but not to polished marble.
I’m about to leave the cemetery when I notice an engraved rendering of the epitaph Ben wrote for himself at a young age while suffering from a serious case of pleurisy.
The Body of
B. Franklin,
Printer;
Like the Cover of an old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stripped of its Lettering & Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be wholly lost:
For it will, as he believ’d
appear once more,
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended
By the Author
Amended and perhaps expanded too. Even the longest and most useful of lives is incomplete. We exit the stage too soon, leaving behind a basketful of disappointments, regrets, and stillborn dreams—journeys not taken, books not finished, words not said.
Ben was not immune from the sad incompleteness of life. He never did write that book he had long talked about, The Art of Virtue, and God knows we could use it. Ditto the Society of the Free and Easy and the Party of Virtue. Most glaring of all, Ben never finished his autobiography. It trails off when he had just turned fifty-one and life was really getting interesting. Why couldn’t he finish it? Sure, he was busy, but too busy to fully chronicle a singular life, the template for the American dream? Come on, Ben. What happened?
The answer, I think, lies in the first two words of history’s most famous incomplete work: “Dear Son.” He began the book as a letter to William. But there was no more William, not as far as Ben was concerned. After the war, he rarely mentioned his son and when he did it was with acid bitterness. In his will, he left William nothing of value, only a few books and papers William already possessed and some worthless land deeds. By explanation, Ben said coldly, “The part he acted against me in the late war… will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavoured to deprive me of.”
For Franklin, the conflict with Britain was, at its heart, a family quarrel, and nothing hurt him more. Ben couldn’t finish his autobiography without thinking of William, and that was too painful. A wound even the great Dr. Franklin couldn’t heal.
Is Ben still with us? Not only on the bills we use to buy Afghan carpets or the signs advertising Philly cheesesteak subs or in his pithy sayings, but in a deeper sense? I’m tempted to speak of his “legacy,” but I don’t care for that word. It is lifeless and inadequate and contains more than a whiff of staleness, like your grandfather’s old suit still hanging in the closet, unworn and unloved. “Legacy” doesn’t do justice to the lasting influence of a great and flawed man like Benjamin Franklin.
Our footprints fade but never disappear. Some, like Franklin’s, grow more pronounced with time. Franklin is the least dead of the founders. Perhaps it’s his love of technology. Unlike Washington or Jefferson, we can picture Franklin sitting in front of a laptop or listening to a podcast with noise-canceling headphones. Heck, I can see Franklin inventing noise-canceling headphones. Perhaps it is something more profound. Perhaps it is how Franklin lived, the values he embraced and actions he took that explain his surprisingly robust afterlife.
It is only a few blocks from the cemetery to my hotel, but those few blocks contain much Ben-ness. The touchstones where Ben lived, studied, joked, dreamed, drank, wrote, convened, cajoled, mourned, experimented—and experienced. More vital than these, though, are the living manifestations of his useful life. The Library Company of Philadelphia is thriving, as is the American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania (now located across the Schuylkill River). A fire engine races by, sirens blaring and lights flashing, and that is Ben’s doing. A feisty newspaper? Ben. Streetlights? Ben. A public vaccine drive? Ben.
As I walk, the sun dipping low on the horizon, a thought bubbles up. Maybe the past doesn’t vanish entirely. Maybe it lingers, like radioactive particles after a nuclear explosion. Only what if—and this is where we get downright possibilian—the past is not harmful, like radiation, but the opposite: an unseen but salutary force, like the good bacteria in your gut or the ozone layer blocking harmful ultraviolet rays.
We speak of the “weight of the past,” but what if it isn’t heavy at all? What if the past is unimaginably light—no, more than light, buoyant, lifting us, supporting us, keeping us afloat?
Surely that changes everything.