As we read above Grace was slight of frame, and not markedly robust. Barely three years after the wreck at which her pity and heroism had won her world-wide fame, she showed evidences of decline. Toward the close of 1841 she was taken from Longstone and placed under the care of a doctor in Bamborough. Not gaining in strength she begged to be moved to Wooler, a small market town on the border of Northumberland, where the scenery is of the Cheviot Hills—of sunny heights and wooded glens. But even here the clear bracing air had little help for her illness, and after meeting her father and considering her failing strength, with his advice she returned to Bamborough. Her eldest sister nursed her with devotion, but it was evident her life was fading.
Throughout her illness she never murmured and never complained, we are are told, and shortly before her death she expressed a wish to see as many of her relations as the peculiar nature of their employment would admit, and with surprising fortitude and self-command she delivered to each one of them some token of remembrance. This done she calmly awaited the approach of death; and finally, on October 20, 1842, resigned her spirit without a murmur.
Two stones have been raised to her memory, one in the Bamborough churchyard, her figure lying at length; and another in the chapel of St. Cuthbert, on one of the Farne Islands, and bearing this memorial:
TO THE MEMORY OF
Grace Horsley Darling
A NATIVE OF BAMBOROUGH AND AN INHABITANT
OF THESE ISLANDS
WHO DIED OCTOBER 20TH, 1842,
AGED 26 YEARS.
But the best memorial of a heroine is the inspiration her example offers to her own generation and those that succeed her, the love her deeds engender in other hearts, the enlarging and uplifting of our kind through her endeavour. And so it is that the heroine of Farne Islands has become a lovely memory to us, and to those who shall come after us.