I’m not sure how death has become a niche I frequently cover, but considering we all deal with death and grief, I do believe there’s power in talking through what final moments look like.
And since death is such a taboo topic, there’s so much people don’t know until they experience it. As Hospice Nurse Julie explained to us in a previous article, many patients go through the “actively dying phase,” whereby the body begins to shut down. Symptoms can be scary to witness (like “fish-out-of-water” breathing, the death rattle, and the rally), but they’re common and not to be feared.
Still, no one knows for certain how they’ll die, and we can’t exactly predict or plan what those infamous “last words” will look like. In some cases, they’re powerful or heartbreaking — in many others, they’re a little anti-climatic (like, “Ice cream please,” as you’ll read below).
It’s also important to note — in many cases, “last words” are often nonexistent because people become nonverbal as their bodies begin to shut down.
So, to get an idea of the range of what last words can look like, over on Reddit, people who work in the medical field shared all the memorable — from the scary to the heartwarming to the anti-climatic — last words they heard from dying patients:
Warning: You might not want to read this right before bed like I did.
2.“I have done hospice work, home health care, and worked in a nursing home. The best was in a nursing home with an [older] man. We knew it was coming soon, but he had no family, so we took turns just being with him. He opened his eyes, smiled, and said, ‘It’s such a lovely day. Don’t let this spoil it.’ It really was a perfect Spring day; he passed about five minutes later.”
3.(Cont’d) “The saddest was a lady in hospice care. She kept saying, ‘Not until they’re all here! Not until they’re all here!’ The family finally admitted she had a son that she had disowned many years prior. They tried to locate him but weren’t successful. She died crying for her boy.”
4.“A few stay with me. For context, [I’m a] paramedic. ‘I think I’m going to die’ — it’s happened on more than one occasion where a patient directly tells me they are going to die and seconds later go into cardiac arrest. It’s so common that ‘a sense of impending doom’ is a legitimate symptom.”
“‘Don’t let me die.’
He [went into cardiac arrest] as we arrived at the hospital. They didn’t get pulses back. Stable on scene but declined rapidly during transport. That family had no way to know that was the last time they’d see him alive.
Me: ‘I’ll see you again!’ Her, smiling: ‘No, you won’t.’
A hospice patient I had transported many times before—on a first-name basis. We always said we would see each other again after I dropped her off. That time was the last time I ever saw her. Some people just know.
That’s what is so sacred about the medical field, really. We have this image of giving our last words to friends or family. However, for many of us, our last words will be delivered to the ears of a complete stranger. In those last moments, I’ll be whatever you need me to be—your child, spouse, and friend. Whatever you say will be heard and carried with me to the end.”
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5.“A dying man to his daughter. ‘Honey, I’m sorry, but I have to go.'”
6.“An older woman was on the phone with her husband, deciding what her code status (aka whether or not to do CPR) should be. She went into cardiac arrest mid-sentence. We didn’t notice the phone when doing CPR until after she was pronounced dead. The husband listened to the entire thing.”
7.“‘I want to tell everyone everything, but I can’t.’ Panicked, pumped full of morphine. Not sinister, just too much left unsaid.”
8.“Never really had any scary ones. Most of my work has been in cancer, so they’ve either died in a relatively comfortable manner with palliative care, or they’ve tended to go pretty suddenly. My favorite was a chap who was unresponsive for a few days, woke up suddenly, and asked for a Cornetto (ice cream, not a croissant). A nurse popped to the shops and got him one. He ate it and then closed his eyes and died. The dude just had to get one last Cornetto in. Legend.”
9.“I was a third-year medical student and was assigned a patient with end-stage hepatic encephalopathy. His vitals were crashing; they called an RRT, and we ran in to assess. We asked, ‘Sir sir, are you alright?’ And his answer was as if a child was asking, ‘Ice cream, please.’ He became unresponsive right after and died. His plaintiff little whimper for ice cream fucked me up.”
10.“I work as a paramedic. [A man crashed his motorcycle] into an electric box by a stop light. He ended up in the wood line in a forest preserve. He was injured, but not that badly. We ran it as a traumatic accident and transported him to a nearby trauma center. He was awake and talking en route.”
“As we pulled into the hospital, he grabbed my hand and said, ‘I see the light. I’m dying right now.’ I tried to reassure him, but by the time he got into the ER, he had died. The ER doc screamed at us for not having him intubated, and so on. I told the doctor what happened, and he immediately apologized.”
11.“I was in the Army. One of my fellow soldiers was able to call their parents on a satellite phone during their death. Their last words were apologies for causing so much trouble as a teen and how they wished they could be back home to fix everything. The parents were in shock. I had to take the phone to let them know their child was gone. I relive this scene on repeat in my nightmares.”
12.“I had a patient that was on the ICU unit. He just kept saying, ‘Please just call my mom. She will come get me, I swear. Please, I just want my mom. Please, I won’t do anything else just get my mom. I want my mom.’ He was 96.”
“It’s quite common [to have elder] dying patients crying out and asking for their mama.”
13.“I once had a guy tell me, ‘In about an hour and a half, I’m gonna quit.’ He proceeded to code multiple times. [We] ended up pronouncing him dead about an hour and a half later. I think those who are alert and are going to die know it’s coming.”
14.“Maybe not the best last words, but a good story nonetheless. He was 92, climbed most of the big mountains except K2 and Everest, and was married for 70 years. His wife passed a week before he did. He had been to the hospital exactly twice—when he was born and when he died. He was on no regular medications, lived at home, was fully independent, and was still driving.”
“He got pneumonia, came to hospital, and deteriorated rapidly. He asked us not to treat him, just to let him die peacefully. He died six hours later. When I told him he was dying, he said, ‘Don’t want to have to come to hospital a third time.'”
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15.“Paramedic here. Went on a lift assist last year. I tried forever to get this woman up off of her bathroom floor. She was a very large woman, so we had to call the fire department for help. She had been weak for the past couple of days, so I convinced her to go to the hospital for evaluation.”
“While wheeling her to the ambulance, she told her son, ‘I’ll call you when I get there.’ From loading her into the ambulance to when I climbed in, she went into pulseless v-tach and died. It was so surreal.”
16.“One of my mom’s patients was an older man at the ER who was cursing out his wife with the final gasps of breath he could muster. His words were incoherent, but you could feel they were full of anger.”
“We later found out he was poisoned, and the wife was likely the culprit due to an insurance fraud case.”
17.“I spoke with the medic who worked on my son. The last thing he said was, ‘I think I did something really stupid.’ Then he went to sleep and never woke back up.”
For context: “He and his friends had completed a grueling hike, and they decided to party to celebrate. Before the party started, they were doing donuts in an empty lot. [My son] decided to hang out of the window, and the jeep rolled. No one else was injured, no alcohol or drugs were involved. It was just a dumb mistake.”
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18.“I worked in a senior care home for many years. Most of the older adults would mumble stuff that I couldn’t make out, but one woman, in particular, said something like, ‘How are you here?’ while looking at the corner of the room a couple of hours before death. Another one told a care aide that her husband was waiting.”
And lastly:
19.“I volunteered at a hospice in my 20s. I sort of got roped into the role but eventually came to enjoy the setting. It was a hospice for men dying of HIV. One particular shift, I finished at 4 p.m., but an awful snowstorm hit the city, and the hospice offered me a bed to sleep in one of the empty rooms. I had a difficult time feeling at all tired because I knew someone had died there a few afternoons ago, so I decided to go and visit a resident who was imminently dying. A few of the residents that night were dying, and some had friends at their bedside, but he didn’t have any.”
“As I sat beside him, his breathing became more irregular. A nurse came in to give me some medication and told me he didn’t have much longer to live. Something compelled me to hold his hand, and the nurse thanked me for being a great volunteer and asked if I could let her know when he no longer appeared to be breathing as she needed to attend to another resident. After she left the room, he opened his eyes and looked right at me and plain as day and said, ‘This weather we are having — I ordered it just so you would stay here with me tonight, you know.’ He then quietly passed away.”
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(Cont’d) “That night, I slept curled up in the [hospice’s] kitchen and waited until morning to head home. When I arrived home, there was police tape surrounding my apartment building. One of my neighbors broke into several apartments with a rifle, including mine, shooting whomever he could find before shooting himself.”
“I remember thinking, had it not been for the storm, I would have been home that night and might have been a victim of his shooting spree. I never forgot the words of that dying resident. I do believe that there was something bigger that night than I could ever come to understand.”
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For more reading about death and dying, check out our previous articles:
If you or someone you know is experiencing feelings of grief, visit The Center for Grief Recovery and Therapeutic Services for resources and support. For grief resources for children, visit Good Grief.
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