Then Tad died. At noon, March 31, Patrick left a message on my machine; he said that during the night, Tad had typed in caps in his computer notebook, HERE GOES. Pat suggested maybe I should get to the hospital? “It’s started,” Tad told me in his quiet way. By the time I found the message and rushed in there, it was almost over, and I held one hand and Patrick was on the other, as at some birth. He was spared nothing, Tad, but he presided over it, “inhabited” his dying. Our boy half-hosted it as he’d done everything else. With one of his final breaths—by then far past language, which had been a great ally of his—he blew sort of a kiss.

Patrick Trevor—after contacting Tad’s parents (who were, for various reasons, unable to be with him at the end), Pat, after signing the coroner’s papers, after speaking to doctors and nurses and the many close friends who’d gathered—bent toward Tad’s computer. (It was still glowing in one corner of the unlit room.) At 1:04 a.m., Patrick withdrew the disk containing Tad’s final “Available for Restoration.” I had agreed to take over this newsletter, so Pat handed the disk to me.

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.