Emily Dickinson died in Amherst, Massachusetts, on this date (May 15, 1886)
She had been in ill health for about two and a half years, and was
confined to her bed for the last seven months of her life. Medical
historians now believe that she was suffering from severe high blood
pressure — she complained of headaches and nausea, and near the end of
her life she struggled to breathe, eventually lapsing into a coma.
Emily’s friend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson wrote the poet’s obituary for The Springfield Republican:
“A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her
swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one
hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see.” Dickinson had
left specific instructions for her burial. Her casket was carried by the
family’s six Irish hired men, on a route that wound its way past her
flower garden, through the barn in back of the house, and through a
field of buttercups.
Very few of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her
lifetime, and what was published was done so anonymously. After her
death, Dickinson’s sister, Lavinia, discovered hundreds of poems that
she had written over the years. The first volume, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was published in 1890.
Source: http://writersalmanac.org/