I wasn't a very good husband, but I hope I shall be a good memory. Scott's carefully wrought final thoughts are very different from Lieutenant-Captain Kolesnikov's scribbled message. Kolesnikov is passing the time awaiting death, struggling to see in near darkness. Technological change has given us unprecedented access to the process of dying. Kolesnikov's final thoughts were, like Scott's, recorded on paper, but we can only read them thanks to modern salvage equipment.
Black boxes record the final words of pilots as their planes plunge into the abyss.
Mobile phones and satellite technology mean there is now no place on earth where people are out of reach. Internet links and webcams make it possible to share your life with a worldwide audience. Or, if you wish, your death. The dying, by accident or by design, are now public property. In 1996, Timothy Leary orchestrated his dying in a manner wholly appropriate to the modern age which, in the 60s, he had helped to define.