William Shatner Said Goodbye to His Sister by Phone Before She Died

The call came from Montreal. William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk, learned that his older sister Joy, three years older than he was, lay in a coma and was dying, and that she was moaning.

His niece, Joy's daughter, was with her. Shatner said he could not fly up there, so he asked her to hold the phone to her mother's ear so he could speak to her.

On the phone, Shatner kept repeating himself. "Joy, it's Billy," he said.

Then he told her what he hoped was ahead. "You're going to go see mommy and daddy," he said. "And I love you, Joy. You're going to be all right. You're going to be peaceful. It's going to be all right, sweetheart."

She answered with a single sound. "Oh," Joy said, in what Shatner described as the most contented sound. Her daughter, still holding the phone, began to cry, and Shatner cried too.

Shatner said he did not know what her coma had really been. It might have been pain, he said, or agony, or a kind of awareness of the people she could not reach.

He imagined her thinking that she was dying and had not seen Billy, and that her daughter was there and she could not reach her.

He wondered what a dying person who is still conscious enough to think is conscious of, whether blackness like the blank he remembered from anesthesia or something seen in the last moment.

He is careful about answers. When he heard about a dying man who seemed to look out and see something, Shatner noted that lack of oxygen is known to cause hallucinations.

About Joy, Shatner said he heard her answer him with that sound after he spoke, and he described her death the next day as peaceful.