what I say: I’m fine
what I actually mean: okay but why would Eddie have to think how to finish his sentence if he was going to say something he had repeated throughout his whole life, since he was a little kid, that he hated when Richie called him Eds? (not true, by the way) How about he hesitated bc for once he was not going to say that, quite the opposite he wanted to express his true feelings towards Richie and that was his very last chance to do it? And Stephen King makes a very focused choice of words in order to convey this ambiguity: in fact if he’d just made him say «You know I… I…», the reader would have thought Eddie did not finish his well-known quote bc he was too weak to go on, but then King adds these words: “Eddie closed his eyes, thinking how to finish, and while he was still thinking it over he died”, so why would he had to think how to finish if he was not going to say something that would have change things forever, in a definitive way????
