ABSTRACT
Towards the end of his life, Winnicott kept a notebook for jotting down fragments of personal memory. The first page opens with a prayer: ‘Oh God! May I be alive when I die.’ The supplication is followed by a graphic description of what he looks like to himself after dying: how ‘the hearse was cold and unfriendly,’ and ‘the lung heavy with water that the heart could not negotiate …’ But at least his prayer had been answered: he was alive when he died.
