Dickinson suffered her first blackout in the spring of
1884. She began to weaken. In April 1884, doctors diagnosed an
advanced case of Bright's Disease, or nephritis–an inflammation
of the kidney. Shortly thereafter, Dickinson received the news
that Otis Lord had died. For the next two years, Dickinson was
effectively an invalid. She rarely left her bed and never wrote
poetry. In the winter of 1885, Dickinson chose to refuse more medical
examinations. As she lay back against her pillows, weak and sick,
Dickinson composed her last poem, "So give me back death."
During the first weeks of May 1886, Dickinson seemed to
sense her impending death and wrote a short note to her cousins
Louise and Fanny Norcross, which said only: "Little Cousins, Called
Back, Emily." On May 13th, Dickinson complained to Lavinia that
she felt especially ill and that it was becoming difficult to breathe.
Later that day she fell into a coma. The family held a vigil around
her bedside for sixty hours. On the evening of May 16th, Emily
Dickinson died.
Dickinson's funeral was held in the Dickinson home. As
she had requested, Dickinson was buried in a robe of white flannel.
Dickinson's siblings placed her white coffin in the library and,
prior to the funeral service, allowed only a select number of Dickinson's
friends to view her in the casket. Among the chosen few was Thomas
Wentworth Higginson.
The service was conducted by George Dickerman. The 15th chapter
from Corinthians–a chapter that Dickinson loved–was read, and Colonel
Higginson read Emily Brontë's poem "Last Lines." Dickinson's white
coffin was placed on a bier of pine bough adorned with sand violets.
Lavinia placed two heliotropes in Dickinson's hand and whispered
to her sister that they were for her to take to Judge Lord. Dickinson
was buried next to her parents at West Street Cemetery in Amherst.
The epitaph on her headstone was the same as the text of the note
she had sent to her cousins Norcross: "Called Back."
After Dickinson was buried, Lavinia and Sue burned Dickinson's letters,
as she had asked. As she continued to clean out Dickinson's room,
Lavinia stumbled upon a locked box with no label. It was the repository
of Dickinson's life's work–all of her poetry. Lavinia was astonished,
and could not bring herself to burn the poems. As time passed,
Lavinia happened upon many secret stashes of poetry and envelopes
filled with scraps of paper covered front and back with verse.
She immediately felt a deep, intense need to see the poems published.
Lavinia would be the first to introduce the world to Dickinson's
poetry.
Lavinia brought the poems to Sue, Dickinson's greatest
confidante during her life. Sue was amazed at the number of poems,
but tempered in her desire to see the poems published. Like Austin,
she worried that the poems' lack of form would be an obstacle in achieving
publication. When she sent a few poems out to literary journals
and magazines, only to have them returned, she felt she needed
to deliberate for a while instead of rushing the poems to a publisher.
Lavinia found Susan's procrastination inexplicable. Dickinson's
literary estate became the prize in a contentious battle between
Dickinson's relative and Mabel Todd. After Dickinson's death, Todd
was able to take advantage of a rift that had developed between
Lavinia and Susan over the snail's pace with which Susan was editing
and selecting Dickinson's poems for publication. Susan was already
angry with Lavinia for giving Austin and Mabel a lover's haven
in her living room. In her anger at Sue, Lavinia gave Mabel hundreds
of Dickinson's poems to edit and publish.
Lavinia went on to edit or co-edit two more volumes of
Dickinson's poetry. Later, Dickinson's niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi would
publish and edit another volume. Mabel Todd, too, would transcribe
and publish a volume. She also brought a lawsuit against Lavinia
and Susan over a provision in Austin Dickinson's will; she lost.
Angry at the Dickinson family, Mabel took all the poems and letters
of Dickinson's she had in her possession and stashed them in a
box, allowing no one to see them for thirty years. In 1945, Bolts
of Melody, edited by Mabel Todd and her daughter Millicent
Todd Bingham, was published. Five years later, Harvard University bought
all available Dickinson manuscripts and the publishing rights to
her poems. In 1960, Thomas H. Johnson published all of her poems
in one volume, without editing for current poetic convention as
Lavinia and Mabel Todd had done. The publication of this volume, Complete
Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1960, finally completed Emily
Dickinson's canon and ensured Dickinson's status as a household
name and a poet's poet. Her innovations and her technical daring
have made an impact on modern poetry that is difficult to overestimate.
