Death
On March 25, 1954, March suffered a mild heart attack and was still recovering when The Bad Seed was published on April 8. He was discharged from the hospital on April 24, but after only three weeks, on the night of May 15, 1954, he died in his sleep of a second and more severe heart attack, aged 60.
On the morning of March's death, the following paragraph was discovered in his typewriter. Entitled "Poor Pilgrim, Poor Stranger", it was presumably written after his discharge from the hospital, and reads:
| “ | The time comes in the life of each of us when we realize that death awaits us as it awaits others, that we will receive at the end neither preference nor exemption. It is then, in that disturbed moment, that we know life is an adventure with an ending, not a succession of bright days that go on forever. Sometimes the knowledge come with the repudiation and quick revolt that such injustice awaits us, sometimes with fear that dries the mouth and closes the eyes for an instant, sometimes with servile weariness, an acquiescence more dreadful than fear. The knowledge that my own end was near came with pain, and afterwards astonishment, with the conventional heart attack, from which, I've been told, I've made an excellent recovery. | ” |
| — William March |
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