Monty Python's Michael Palin shares amusing three-word epitaph as says 'I'll die soon'

Monty Python legend Michael Palin has accepted he is going to die soon and wants his epitaph to read “gone to lunch”. The comedy icon and travel presenter has come to terms his own mortality following the passing of his wife of 57 years Helen in 2023, and the death of his dear friend and fellow Python Terry Jones, who passed in 2020 from dementia at the age of 77.

Palin, 81, realises he’s just a slip or an illness away from having to stop making anymore travel documentaries or, worse still, departing this mortal coil, although he hopes he will continue to be in good health.

Speaking on The Third Act podcast, he said: “I'm aware that I haven't got that long to live." I could fall down the stairs anytime really, or go under a bus. I feel physically fine, and I feel quite able to deal with it, but that is just a fact of life. So although you look back in the past, you also look forward and think, ‘What will I do to keep going?’ Touch wood I will be physically okay to do another journey, but I might not be. And then if I can't do any more traveling, I mean, things happen. With your body, things begin to wear out, and I have to be prepared for that.”

When asked if he has the words ready for his own epitaph, he answered: “Yes, I have. It's gone to lunch.”

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Michael - who has two sons Thomas and William and daughter Rachel as well as four grandchildren - says watching his beloved Helen deteriorate with kidney failure made him “comfortable” with death, as ultimately it released her from great pain.

Although Palin isn’t a Christian, he does pray to a higher power for comfort and respected those who do believe in an afterlife.

The star - who mocked Christianity in the Monty Python films The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life - said: “I've become quite comfortable with it [death] now, really.

“Helen was quite ill for about two years, and gradually wound down, couldn't leave the house, lost her mobility and lots of things, she was always very active. And I saw that, and we talked a lot about decay and approaching death. We didn't sort of shy away from that, but I always said, ‘You’re not, Kate, you'll be all right, you'll get better.’ And she didn't actually get better. So in the end when she died, it seemed the best thing.

“So I don't have a horror of death, and I don't feel death has to be a malignant thing. “It was awful that she got ill, I wish all these things hadn't happened to her, but they did, and it delivered her from a lot of pain.

“I think about God. I have sort of a rather ambivalent attitude to God. I have no faith in the sense that, you know, the sort of belief in Christ saving the and all that. But I do believe in people's belief, and I'm rather reassured that some people do have belief. And I have a feeling that, you know, I say my prayers, and I think that's a good thing. Just to sort of remember there's something else there. I mean, it probably isn't, It’s a construct to make us deal with the feeling that we're just not going drop off the end of the earth, and that'll be it.”

Sir Michael met his future wife while holidaying in the seaside town of Southwold, Suffolk, and later fictionalised the encounter in a 1987 TV drama for the titled East Of Ipswich.

The couple had three children and four grandchildren, and celebrated their wedding anniversary just two-and-a-half weeks before her death in May last year. She died after suffering from chronic pain and kidney failure.

In October last year, Palin spoke of feeling "lopsided" and without a "rudder" after his wife's death.

At the time he said: "We were together for a very long time. We were married for 57 years and I met her before that so more than two thirds of my life was spent with her. And so you form a kind of unit.

"You don't realise that until someone's gone and then it's slightly lopsided, like something tips over, and your rudder goes.

"You end up thinking it was just me but I need my partner there to sort of keep me on the straight and narrow.

"It's not the great things that you've said, very often a lot of things that are unsaid because if you know somebody really, really well, you don't have to sort of analyse everything or say everything, you just know the way they will feel. So I had to get adjusted to that."

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