Thomas Merton died in 1968, in Bangkok, Thailand. He was stepping out of a bath and for some reason touched an electric fan; it was wired incorrectly, and the shock killed him. He was on a tour of Asia at the time, during which he met the Dalai Lama, and some sources suggest that he may have been planning to remain in that continent as a hermit.

Based on the rest of Merton's life, this assumption seems unlikely. He was in many ways a man who marched to the beat of a different drummer, but that march -- however slow and uncertain it might have been at times -- was inevitably towards the Church of Rome and its stricter monastic orders.

In the Trappist order, and particularly in what he called "contemplative prayer," Merton found peace. His life had not always been so peaceful; in earlier life he almost certainly fathered an illegitimate child, and even after his calling he could be at odds both with his abbot and with his Church. There is little danger of his ever becoming a saint. This is in part the reason that the person of Merton can be so accessible to the recovering addict, for God knows we are far from perfect ourselves.

In one of his last books, Contemplative Prayer, Merton writes these beautiful words for all practitioners of Step 11:

What am I? I am myself a word spoken by God. Can God speak a word that does not have any meaning?

Yet am I sure that that the meaning of my life is the meaning God intends for it? Does God impose a meaning on my life from the outside, through event, custom, routine, law, system, impact with others in society? Or am I called to create from within ... a meaning which reflects his truth ...? By meditation I penetrate the inmost ground of my life [and] seek the full understanding of God's will for me ....