My chief duty, as the strongest of the family, was to lift
him up while the sheets were being changed. When they were making
the bed, I had to hold him in my arms like a child.
I remember how my muscles quivered one day with the exertion.
He looked at me with astonishment and said:
"You surely don't find me heavy? What nonsense!"
I thought of the day when he had given me a bad time at riding
in the woods as a boy, and kept asking, "You're not tired?"
Another time during the same illness he wanted me to carry him
down-stairs in my arms by the winding stone staircase.
"Pick me up as they do a baby and carry me."
He had not a grain of fear that I might stumble and kill him.
It was all I could do to insist on his being carried down in an
arm-chair by three of us.
Was my father afraid of death?
It is impossible to answer the question in one word. With his
tough constitution and physical strength, he always instinctively
fought not only against death, but against old age. Till the last
year of his life he never gave in, but always did everything for
himself and even rode on horseback.
To suppose, therefore, that he had no instinctive fear of
death is out of the question. He had that fear, and in a very
high degree, but he was constantly fighting to overcome it.
Did he succeed?
I can answer definitely yes.
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