My mom’s last words were, “I want some Coke.” She sipped it through a straw and with each intake her pulse slowed. She paused drinking, eyes closed. I asked her to take another sip because we needed the numbers to drop.

A mucus plug in her post-surgery lungs cut off her breathing as she started to take another sip. She choked and then coded.

It’s hard to even remember what happened after. I don’t think she spoke again to anyone in the room. There were so many people in the room. Machines screamed, nurses and doctors shouted, a crash cart thundered in, followed by a pulmonologist on-call at the ER. He intubated her esophagus.

I was huddled in the corner of the room until someone thought to throw me out. At that moment, I fully believed putting the straw into her mouth and urging her to drink caused her to code.

For years really, my heart felt like I was to blame. My head knows that correlation is not causation. The pulmonologist came out of ICU to explain this and the fact that my mom was no longer breathing on her own. He took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes, “This wasn’t your fault. It was mucus, and then we intubated her incorrectly and ran out of time.”

When the rest of my family arrived — I had begged to be left alone on the night shift to get some time with my mom — I didn’t know what to tell them. I just kept repeating the Coke story, cementing it into my heart and soul.

I never told them about her last words because they seemed too insignificant and small. But I will never forget her raspy voice, her weakness, and her eyes when she said, “I want some Coke.”

I suppose I didn’t know they were her last words until a week later. I hoped that she would recover, but after three days she did not and life support was removed. She died a few days after that. That’s when the words became her last words.

I had expected more. Not specifically from my mom, but, in general, I expected last words to have greater depth and meaning. I suppose if you know the words will be your last, then you might be inclined to make them count.
But last things are hard to predict.

My 19-year-old daughter asked me the other day, “When was the last time you held me?”

The firsts are memorable. I will never forget her first breath, her first words, her first steps. But I don’t remember the last time I picked her up in my arms. On a specific day at a specific time I picked her up and she, perhaps, laid her head on my shoulder. And, on that same day a few moments later I put her down for the last time.

She asked as if I’d know precisely, as if there would be a story, a memory. I don’t think I could bear to live my life if I knew in advance about all of the lasts. I don’t want to have never picked her up again. I imagine if someone had told me, “Today will be the last time,” I’d probably have picked her up and carried her as long as I could and then picked her up again and again.

It seems wrong to put a child down and never pick her up again. But, it’s inevitable. It is the way of the world.

“Goodbyes” are mostly “see you laters.” At least for the optimists among us. For the pessimists, I suspect life is a series of imagined last times.

When I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2012, I began attending a support group. Of the dozen or so regular attendees, seven died within 18 months. We experienced loss over and over again. It was excruciating to watch folks decline. One woman lost weight every week. Though she became frail, she never lost her energy. She drove herself to her last meeting.

I remember going to her to tell her how much she meant to me. I’d wanted to for weeks, and now it seemed time was quickly running out. She always said, “These last 12 months,” which became 18 months and then 22 months and then 24 months— “have been the best of my life.” It’s hard to believe someone when they say such a thing about a terminal diagnosis, but for MK it was true. You could see it was true. She accomplished everything she’d set out to do. She celebrated each holiday, shopped for birthdays for her children and grandchildren, took a long driving vacation to Florida on her own, ate whatever she wanted and savored wine.

When I went to her on that last night, she said, “Kerri, you know, it’s been a good couple of years, but I wish I could have kept working. I miss my job.”

No one, we’re told, says on their death bed that they wished they’d spent more time at work. But, apparently, people at their last support group meeting do. She had been a teacher of kids with disabilities and she missed the kids terribly. Over the year-and-a-half that I was there, she lit up every time she told us about volunteering at her old school.

“I miss my job” weren’t MK’s last words, but they were the last ones I heard her say.

I remember her coat, the feel of the brushed cotton when I gave her shoulders a delicate squeeze in lieu of a hug that I feared would crush her. I remember the tenor of her voice, the slight wobble.

Last moments channel all the worth and weight of a person. They become talismans. Wisdom is the aura of a last moment, except you have to add it in later most of the time, write it back into the story.

I always tell myself that I knew it would be the last time I saw MK and that she knew it, too. Somehow that makes it more momentous. But I doubt very much that MK would want me to remember her last words as being, “I miss my job.” She was an optimist to her core, wry and wily, but an optimist too. She would have wanted me—anxious, fretting me—to remember that her last months were the best months of her life. Regret wasn’t a dominant part of her lived experience. It was fleeting, that comment, wistful. Still, they were the last words I remember her saying.

It was a bit different with my friend B. She and I both knew that the lasts were piling up and to take note of them. On the last day of our visit with her and her family, she stood at the top of her driveway watching us back out in our rental car. Our eyes locked and we knew it was for the last time. She was too sick and I lived too far away.

She sent two emails out to a large group of us, both described as her “last.” In the first of the two, her penultimate sentence, the one just before “I love you all” was this: “I’m glad we got a new kitten.” In the second, a few weeks later, she wasted no words and simply invited people who lived nearby to come over and “recycle” her shoes and clothes and jewelry by taking what they could use. And, one last time, “With much love.”

Last words are sometimes ordinary, impersonal, pragmatic, and surprisingly small in scope. In a study of suicide notes by Dr. John Pestian, “neutral” content is second only to the emotional. Writers left instructions and to-do lists. He explained:

“Secondarily, what you see most often is these practical instructions. Remember to change the tires. Remember to change the oil. I drew a check, but I didn’t put the money in. Please go ahead and make the deposit.*”
Our lives come down to the prosaic and quotidian.

Maybe not always, but often enough that we should take note.

People are made up of spiritual qualities, the emotional, the human connections, the thoughts and ideas. And we’re also made up of the material, the needs of the body. We spend our lives at work and running errands more often than we spend them meditating or reflecting. Our relationships are stuffed with life’s ordinariness as well as with its power.

We talk more about where we want to eat than we do about what we want to leave behind. If life is going to mean anything at all, I suspect we have to find it in the day-to-day, the routine, the ordinary.

My mom’s last wish was to drink some Coke. Not because it was the last thing she wanted to do, but because it was the last thing she was able to process cognitively. And in her last conscious moments on this earth she got to taste sweet syrup and bubbly carbonation. Maybe the bubbles went up her nose a bit. Maybe the syrup coated her sore throat. As I held the straw to her lips, I hope she saw me and knew how grateful I was to give her some Coke.

* “Analyzing the Language of Suicide Notes to Help Save Lives.” National Public Radio, Inc., May 15, 2013. www.npr.org/2013/05/15/184232472/analyzing-thelanguage-of-suicide-notes-to-help-save-lives

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