A man is not completely born until he be dead.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
We begin, naturally, at the end. It is only here, at life’s terminus, where the journey makes sense. Taking the measure of a life still being lived is like reviewing a movie you’re still watching or a meal you’re still eating. Your verdict is bound to be incomplete at best, foolish at worst.
Every ending is different but none are happy. Benjamin Franklin’s final chapter, unfolding at his Philadelphia home in spring 1790, was no exception. The closing scene was faithfully recorded by Polly Stevenson, who was like a second daughter to Franklin. In London, they lived under the same roof for many years and shared a fierce curiosity about the natural world. His “dear little philosopher,” he called her.
In the last year of his life, Ben rarely left his bedroom. He rigged a means to close the door from bed by using a series of cords and pulleys. Suffering from gout, kidney stone, and pleurisy, he was in pain, despite the laudanum, a tincture of opium mixed with alcohol he was taking in increasing doses. Still, reports Polly, “No repining, no peevish expression ever escaped him,” nor an iota of self-pity.
Eighty-four years old, Benjamin Franklin had enjoyed a long life, especially considering the numerous, often colorful ways one could meet their demise in the eighteenth century. Franklin survived multiple illnesses, two wars, eight ocean crossings, and a botched experiment involving a lethal electrical charge and a turkey. Everyone marveled at Franklin’s longevity and none more so than Franklin himself. “I seem to have intruded myself into the company of posterity, when I ought to have been a-bed and asleep,” he told a friend. “Yet had I gone at seventy it would have cut off twelve of the most active years of my life, employed too in matters of the greatest importance.” That is an understatement. The last decades of Franklin’s life were his busiest and his happiest.
After a lifetime of kinetic activity, Benjamin Franklin accomplished what had long eluded him: repose. By 1788, his various public obligations discharged, he could sit back and enjoy “the leisure I have so long wish’d for.” Here was Franklin at rest, or as close to rest as possible for such a restless man. There was still much to do: an autobiography to finish, a life to assess, and a house to look after, a small compound on Philadelphia’s Market Street now known as Franklin Court.
Ben spent his final years reading and writing, meeting old friends, and entertaining guests. He was an amiable, if quirky, host, serving simple fare of beer and russet potatoes. One visitor, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, recalled how he arrived expecting to meet American royalty but instead found “a short, fat, trunched old man in plain Quaker dress, bald pate, and short, white locks, sitting without his hat under the tree.” Franklin’s ordinariness was perhaps his most extraordinary quality.
Franklin loved to show visitors his inventions and curiosities: a two-headed snake, a glass contraption demonstrating the human circulatory system, an early version of today’s copier, a “long-arm” device that enabled him to reach the top shelves of his many bookcases. Franklin Court resembled, if nothing else, an eighteenth-century version of the Sharper Image—a world apart from the simple two-room house young Ben had shared with nearly a dozen family members in his native Boston.
Toward the end, in early April 1790, he briefly rallied, raising hopes, but two weeks later an abscess in one of his lungs burst, filling them with fluid. “A calm lethargic state succeeded,” reports John Jones, the attending physician. Then, on April 17 at 11 p.m., “he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of eighty-four years and three months.”
The doctor’s choice of words is important—not merely a long life, but a long and useful one. Usefulness mattered a lot in the eighteenth century. The greatest test of an idea, any idea, was its utility. Did it promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number?
The truth is that we are ambivalent about leading useful lives. We claim it’s what we strive toward, yet complain that so-and-so is “just using us.” Being the kind of person whom others regularly use is seen as a character flaw. But maybe it is the highest compliment. Rather than avoiding being used, perhaps I should invite it. Yes, please. Use me.
Usefulness was especially important to Franklin. The word appears nearly thirty times in his autobiography. It motivated him. It defined him. He was a useful printer, a useful statesman, a useful scientist, a useful writer, and a useful friend. And he was a useful revolutionary—arguably the most useful, second only to George Washington.
Am I useful? I have my doubts. When I compare myself to others, I come up short. My father was a doctor. He saved lives. My mother was a teacher. She shaped lives. My friend James leads guided meditations. He calms lives. Me? I scratch words onto a page, and some days not many of those. So, no, I am not useful, certainly not compared to Benjamin Franklin.
This realization triggers a low-grade melancholy that has shadowed me for years. Ben suffered no such despondency. He retained a sanguine outlook and never lost hope, even when others did. When asked if something could be done, or done better, he always replied, in so many words, “Why the heck not?”
Benjamin Franklin was not a pragmatist. He was what neuroscientist David Eagleman calls a “possibilian.” The pragmatist asks, “What can we do about this now?” The possibilian imagines what might be done in the future, no matter how improbable. The possibilian is infinitely patient. The possibilian always perseveres, and never sighs.
Might there be a possibilian lurking inside me, too?