Michael Cudlitz Explains Abraham’s Final Thoughts on The Walking Dead
If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, chances are, you still aren’t over Abraham’s death. While it was suspected, for a while, that he would be the one to be taken out by Negan – due to his confidence and refusal to kneel at his feet, it still didn’t hit us (no pun intended) that it would be happening until it was happening.
Recently, Michael and Robert Kirkman sat down with Skybound and Michael explained what he was thinking and why he made the choice not to bow at Negan’s command.
‘I think he was praying that it would be him. I think that at this point, at the point we’re at in the end of Season 6, Abraham knows he’s figured out these guys. He knows that this kind of operation to work the way it is, for all of the men to be under his control the way he is, there’s a lay of the land. He sees when Negan is describing what he has to do now, that someone has to pay for this, he knows that he wants it to be him because he wants to protect everybody else. That’s just in his nature. I think he feels once he is chosen, he really is at peace.’
Abraham had grown a lot as a character, not just in his final days, but in the ones before it. He had realized the things that were truly important, he’d also realized what wasn’t, and dying for the group was his act of self-sacrifice. It was his act of big love.
Looking back on all of the deaths in The Walking Dead history, all of the characters we’ve lost have left an impact on us one way or another. However, it’s the ones who died in love are the ones that hit the hardest, the ones we think back on the most fondly. While his last words were totally in true Abraham fashion, his last gesture was a show of love to Sasha, a character who too, self-sacrificed so that the group could go on, so that the opportunity would one day come to stop Negan.
We like to think that the two are living out their dreams in some alternate universe now, maybe in a better way than they had imagined for their story in the midst of the apocalypse. What we know for sure is that both Abraham and Sasha had two of the kindest hearts in the series’ history, and knowing that Michael felt that Abraham did what he did out of love makes us feel a little bit better, too.
‘…but I knew him’
