Fuller's Death and Final Days (1983)

"She squeezed my hand!" — Fuller's last words, spoken at the bedside of the wife he had loved for sixty-six years.

On Friday, July 1, 1983, R. Buckminster Fuller died of a massive heart attack at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. He was eighty-seven years old, eleven days short of his eighty-eighth birthday. He was sitting at the bedside of his wife Anne Hewlett Fuller, who lay in a coma-like state from terminal cancer. Holding her hand, he suddenly exclaimed to his daughter Allegra: "She squeezed my hand!" He stood up — and moments later suffered cardiac arrest. He died approximately one hour later. According to the account published by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, drawn from Allegra Fuller Snyder and her son Jaime Snyder (both present at the hospital), Fuller's body displayed "an exquisitely happy smile." Allegra and Jaime never spoke with him again after the attack.

Anne Hewlett Fuller died on July 3, approximately thirty-six hours after her husband, without ever regaining consciousness. She was eighty-seven. They had married on July 12, 1917, at Rock Hall on Long Island — they were one week short of their sixty-sixth wedding anniversary. Anne's cancer had recurred in April 1983 after earlier surgery; by mid-June she could no longer consume food. During diagnostic procedures, medical staff perforated her esophagus, and she entered a coma-like state from which she never emerged.

On Fuller's desk when he died lay a neatly arranged fourteen-page typewritten manuscript — "Proposal for a Livingry Services Industry" — with a note saying it was important. Written in 1982 for a conference at Waseda University in Tokyo, it outlined his plan for converting the world's military-industrial capacity into enterprises devoted to improving quality of life for all humans: "an alternative to politics and its ever more wasteful warring." It was his last written work and was never published in his lifetime. That the final document on his desk was about livingry — life-supporting technology as the antidote to weaponry — was a fitting capstone to the career he had launched with his 1927 crisis.

In the last months of his life, Fuller delivered a series of four all-day lectures he called "Integrity Days" — at the Los Angeles Convention Center (February 26), San Francisco (April 30), Town Hall in New York (June 4), and Huntington Beach (June 25). The final lecture was just six days before his death. When asked "What is Integrity?" Fuller answered with a single word: "Courage." The lectures were recorded and later released as a five-CD set titled Only Integrity Is Going to Count (2004).

Fuller and Anne are buried together at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The site features a raised granite marker inscribed "CALL ME TRIMTAB / BUCKY" — the trimtab metaphor he had articulated in the 1972 Playboy interview as his philosophy of individual agency. A ground-level marker bears an engraved buckminsterfullerene molecule. The main stone reads: R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER / "CALL ME TRIMTAB" / JULY 12, 1895 – JULY 1, 1983 / ANNE HEWLETT FULLER / JANUARY 9, 1896 – JULY 3, 1983.

The story of their dying within thirty-six hours of each other — after sixty-six years of marriage, Fuller clutching her hand, exclaiming at her last squeeze — has become one of the most widely told narratives about Fuller's life, cited in biographies, tributes, and D.W. Jacobs's one-man play R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe. Isamu Noguchi, Fuller's friend of more than fifty years, wrote the official tribute for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recalling their first meetings at Romany Marie's café in Greenwich Village and describing Fuller as "a very human person who loved people." Frank Lloyd Wright had called him "a man with more absolute integrity than any man I have ever known."

After Fuller's death, his daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder and grandson Jaime Snyder founded the Buckminster Fuller Institute (1983), which served as custodians of the Fuller archive, administered the Fuller Challenge ($1M+ in prizes, 2007-2017), and publishes the Trimtab newsletter. In 1999, the archive moved to Stanford University Libraries as the R. Buckminster Fuller Papers — over 1,300 linear feet including the Dymaxion Chronofile, 2,000 hours of audio and video, and thousands of models.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller — the central figure
• Anne Hewlett Fuller — his wife of 66 years
• Allegra Fuller Snyder — daughter who founded the BFI
• Trimtab — the gravestone inscription and his philosophy of agency
• Livingry — the subject of the manuscript on his desk
• Fuller's 1927 Crisis — the crisis that launched his 56-year experiment
• Dymaxion Chronofile — the archive now at Stanford
• Guinea Pig B — Fuller's account of the experiment that ended July 1, 1983

Sources

• Fuller's Death and Final Days (research)