A longtime activist dies still fighting for the way she wanted to be buried.

"Why aren’t you wearing eye shadow?”

According to my notes, right after she comments on my weight loss (“You used to be really pudgy!”) these are the first words out of Darby Moss Worth’s mouth after I settle in to a chair in her sunlit living room in Carmel Valley on Jan. 10. I had received word a few days before from mutual friends that I should go and see her, because she wanted to see me.

Worth was on her last legs, so to speak, and she had entered hospice care at home. Her doctor didn’t want to give her pills that would end her life, although, she said, he was willing to give her enough morphine to put down a horse. But in either case, if she wasn’t gone by Feb. 5, she planned to stop eating and drinking and slip away naturally.

At age 93, with such advanced congestive heart failure that her legs had begun to turn black, she had earned the right to an exit of her own choosing. But I had come for words of wisdom, some final insights before she left, and she wanted to ask me about my lack of eye shadow?

“I never wear eye shadow,” I tell her.

“Well please start,” she says, her green eyes glittering and her hair held back by a sparkling green headband. “Just a little bit. I always wear just a little bit.”

We settle in to talk, but first she orders Weekly photographer Nic Coury around. I brought her a loaf of homemade banana bread, and she wants Coury to fetch a knife and a plate, so she tells him to go into the kitchen and find them.

“Can I give you my final words?” I sit on the edge of my seat, anticipating, but then she yells at Coury as he’s fumbling around in the kitchen, “For Christ’s sake, put it back where you found it!

“My kitchen is your kitchen and Nic’s kitchen,” she says. “We need to find a good-looking 30-year-old broad for Nic. Are you a good cook, Nic? Yes? Good, because when we find you a good-looking 30-year-old broad you need to treat her well and cook for her.”

Coury and I had met Worth years before, in 2015, when I wrote and he photographed a cover story about the longtime peace and human rights activist’s fight to be buried in her front yard. Not cremated and then buried in her front yard, mind you – she wanted someone to dig a hole, wrap her in a sheet (or not, I was never clear on that part) and actually put her body in said hole, then cover it with dirt.

There, the former TWA flight attendant and teacher would happily decay in the front yard of the home she and her late husband bought in the 1960s.

The home burial process, though, was expensive and fraught with red tape, requiring a person, in essence, to become their own official cemetery and pay exorbitant fees and bonds to the state. As she neared her end, Worth had decided that her remains would be sent to Washington State to be composted as part of the Recompose Project, formerly known as the Urban Death Project.

There are things Worth tells me she wants me to do. She wants me to help end mass incarcerations. She wants me to help end corporate personhood. She wants me to advocate for single-payer health care. She wants me to take the large can of pumpkin puree from her cupboard and make pumpkin bread with it. She wants me to take a beautiful silk scarf her nephew bought her, as a remembrance of her. She wants me to help end all wars.

“War is the real enemy. Let’s tell everybody that this year,” she says. “Is the orange-headed testosterone bomb insane? I really think so. What’s the matter with the American public that they would permit this to have happened?”

Worth pauses, slightly out of breath. She doesn’t want to take any more morphine right now because it makes her loopy, and she wants to be clear. She shuffles through a sheath of papers, trying to find a Mary Oliver poem she wants to read to me. It’s titled “I Worried.” One line is as follows: “Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better?”

Darby believed we could all do better.

Darby Moss Worth died on Jan. 20 in her Carmel Valley home, her final days filled with visits from friends. Plans for a memorial service are pending.

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at maryrduan@gmail.com