Back home, and right after the funeral, soon as I saw the pages printed out, I understood that, despite Tad’s determination to finish Issue # 14, despite Tad’s victory in staying one room ahead of the dementia, certain lapses had occurred. Confusions about sequence and details beset him at the end. Because of a final throat infection, Tad was sometimes unable to speak (“the worst indignity, damnit”); so he’d commenced typing notes to Pat and others, using the screen of his Toshiba Notebook. These were interspersed with hard-sell raves about some condemned home’s architectural niceties. The computer’s amber screen was often his hospital room’s only night light.

Tad’s notes and personal asides found their way into what, without such personal interjections, might have been a more official, if less original, text.

With Patrick’s permission and after my having misgivings about it, I want to offer a sample of this final document. I do this, being sure that Tad Worth, always able to see beauty latent under surface rust and seeming ruin, would approve.

In the final hospital stay, during his clear early weeks, Tad wrote the portrait of Elkton Green with which this issue started. (Despite his, I thought, irresistible come-on, we lost that great house to the insatiable yellow bulldozers.)

After describing Elkton Green so well, after thinking his portrait had sold the house, if now unable to talk effectively, Tad still tried to interest some new buyer in Shadowlawn, too. He would work on this document during his stray good 10-minute patches. By then the plantation house had been largely restored by Tad and the crew. And I’m glad to say that we have now sold Shadowlawn to Pam and Joseph Wainwright, who know exactly what they have and are willing to do whatever’s required to pull it back from the edge. So, Tad, it is saved.

This, the end of his Shadowlawn entry, was the last thing he typed. Of all his final ramblings, it’s what I choose to print:

The carriage house retains its frilled facing and a small family chapel, close by the water, still have traces of an ebonized Maltese cross atop its modified cupula…. The records show that slave and master worshiped here as one and

Needs further expertise regarding modern plumbing. Still suitable fr. occupancy. Somebody is out there, sure of that … needs.

New systems required throughout, oh true … By now there are hookups for natural gas heat and air, the evenings expecially, and the sense of others who’ve been near and can be … Mint, mention mint….