An interesting comment on a different subject that might be relevant.
This is the big danger here. People want there to be some sort of poetic end to death. Because it provides us with comfort to think that there was something happy, as a way to grapple with grief. We want there to be something to hold onto, because the alternative is grappling with the fact that often people will just suddenly die.
It's nice to think that someone passes and they say something special for their last words. Or that they create something that summarises their life's work.
But that often doesn't happen. The difficult but healthy part of any grieving process, whether it's for a loved one, or even for a celebrity is this: how they died and what they ended on doesn't change what they did.
Would it be fitting if Conroy had recorded lines as Thomas Wayne? With his last words telling a child Bruce Wayne that everything is okay and nothing will hurt? Yes. It would be.
Does Conroy likely not ending his life and career like that change the several decades of work he did? No, it doesn't.
Sometimes people are like David Bowie, where they construct a final masterpiece before they pass on, leaving us behind a fitting epitaph for their existence. Other times people are like Peter Sellers, and after a career of iconic movies, you die with a terrible Fu Manchu movie being your final role.
Of all things, an episode of How I Met Your Mother explores this very well. There's a whole episode where a character grappling with grief becomes obsessed with what the last words of their suddenly dead parent said to them, with the options rapidly going from a casual goodbye, to a comment about crocodile Dundee to a slightly racist comment about Koreans. The lesson that the character met with was that the life lived was what mattered. Not the last words.
