I love you, see you tomorrow

December 6, 2015 1:50 PM

The Last Message Received. This is a Tumblr chronicling people's final communications with one another, for reasons mundane, mysterious, dramatic or tragic. It may make you a bit misty.
posted by zeusianfog (45 comments total)

About what percentage of these do you think are real?
posted by box at 1:51 PM on December 6, 2015 [6 favorites]

An odd mix of touching last words from dead relatives and asshole exes.
posted by kmz at 1:55 PM on December 6, 2015 [10 favorites]

Someone should compile a list of "final comments before a MeFi flameout".
posted by HuronBob at 1:56 PM on December 6, 2015 [17 favorites]

More of them seem real than I would have expected, because most of the drama is the exes--where as far as I can tell they haven't died, they're just now Exes For A Reason. The others are mostly very ordinary and that seems like it makes them sadder than if they were really special.

I know my last message from my dad is likely still in my Gmail somewhere but I refuse to look for it.
posted by Sequence at 1:58 PM on December 6, 2015 [4 favorites]

I assume none of these are real.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:14 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]

Man, do I ever feel like a bore in comparison to some of these. I don't have a copy of it, but I'm pretty sure my final communication with my most significant ex was making arrangements for her to get some dishes back from me.
posted by The Gooch at 2:17 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

My last phone message from a long-unwell neighbor who died about four years ago was pretty simple - he asked me to pick some mail up for him when he went to the hospital, wished me and my kids well, and said not to worry, he'd be seeing us soon enough.

It was unexpectedly deleted by my phone company automatically after a month, despite my saving it repeatedly. Whenever I think about that I get angry about it again.
posted by mhoye at 2:27 PM on December 6, 2015 [8 favorites]

Someone should compile a list of "final comments before a MeFi flameout".


http://mefiteslastwords.tumblr.com/
posted by rakish_yet_centered at 2:33 PM on December 6, 2015 [20 favorites]

I agree that a lot of these seems pretty plausibly real. At the same time, I actually think this would make a pretty cool creative writing prompt. First of all, just coming up with a bunch of plausible last messages, and then also using those to build a story around that.

Also, maybe this makes me a bad person, but I found this one to be really amusing:

"BTW Your soul inspired my outfit today"
He sent a picture of his outfit, too.
All black.

Who knows if it's real, but I definitely have known a few particularly dramatic personality types who might do something like this. I'm assuming it's intended to be a pointed message, but I'm pretty sure I would find it pretty hilarious. Although I also would totally dump any friend or SO who ever pulled something like that, because seriously, that is some very immature 13 year old kind of shit. (To be fair, I suppose this could very well have been submitted by someone who is 13, so there's that.)
posted by litera scripta manet at 2:33 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Metafilter one is better...

>“The Stones always had an ‘edge’, whereas the the Beatles were sort of adorable.”

OH NOW IT'S ON
posted by Sing Or Swim at 2:37 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

How do they know it's the last thing they'll ever say to them? Not all of them are dead!
posted by tehloki at 2:49 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

The constant tone shifts between mundane texts from relatives who died in their sleep to pissy exes makes this kind of hard to want to read.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:52 PM on December 6, 2015 [9 favorites]

does anyone read the posts down here?
posted by schmod at 2:53 PM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Dearest Friends,
"I love you" is too trite to express how I feel about you. I may not get the chance to say more. Only time and my choices will say.
Yours always, [name redacted]

That's a mass e-mail one of my friends sent to almost 70 people before he committed suicide in 2012. I need to save it somewhere, on the chance that gmail dies and deletes everything precious from the last however many years.

I have no trouble believing these at all. The mix of heartbreaking in retrospect but ordinary at the time and full of drama and angst seems about right. Thanks for sharing.
posted by ActionPopulated at 3:10 PM on December 6, 2015 [9 favorites]

http://mefiteslastwords.tumblr.com/

This reminds me of nothing so much as the dramabomb Metatalk thread where it turned out that a beloved member had not in fact committed suicide, or even done a damn thing he said he'd done in his commenting history. It was not good for the site, but it did last me a long time while I was stuck on a train with my iPhone.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:16 PM on December 6, 2015

Countess, what thread was that?
posted by HuronBob at 3:25 PM on December 6, 2015

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/21740/holdkris99s-death-was-a-hoax ?
posted by andrewcooke at 3:32 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]

Such a bittersweet experience of other people's lives, in tiny time capsules. The lost moments of love found and lost. Reminders that parents and husbands pass instantly. That while we live our lives, other lives end. That despite being gone forever, we remain on each other's minds, and in each other's hearts. That beneath the faces of even difficult people lie people, with the same love and ache that each of us feels, ourselves. Overall, a good reminder to be kind. For we never do know when our time with another will come to a conclusion, and how it will linger on in such a bittersweet way.
posted by nickrussell at 3:51 PM on December 6, 2015 [4 favorites]

I feel really sad for the person who submitted the last message from their "The One," whom they are clearly not over. He's not The One, anonymous submitter; he never was The One, and he never will be The One. The One is someone who loves you back.
posted by Metroid Baby at 4:10 PM on December 6, 2015 [4 favorites]

On the bitchier end of the spectrum, I got the following from a "friend" I'd been meeting with semi-regularly to cook dinner and share the leftovers. (We saw each other around a bit socially after this, but this is the last time we tried to be real friends, and they don't talk to me anymore.)

"There's not a lot of people I can spend large chunks of time with on a regular basis; turns out you're not one of them. Which is unfortunate, since otherwise it really worked out to have cooking be a more structured thing for me.
Sorry I've been so crap at communicating. I feel really really bad about that."
posted by ActionPopulated at 4:19 PM on December 6, 2015 [4 favorites]

Someone should compile a list of "final comments before a MeFi flameout".

http://mefiteslastwords.tumblr.com/

Oh my god I'm on there.
posted by rorgy at 4:59 PM on December 6, 2015

http://mefiteslastwords.tumblr.com/

Whoever created that site is a liar. Literally none of the comments I've checked so far were the mefite's last one, and I checked several.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 5:06 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

Reminds me of http://thetweethereafter.com/, except with tumblr.
posted by offalark at 5:19 PM on December 6, 2015

Cosmic.osmo, the site hasn't been updated since 2011 and some of the people who disabled their accounts have since returned (and, in some cases, disabled their accounts again).

This site gave me whiplash from the rapid shifts between unexpected deaths of intimates and teen breakup drama.
posted by gingerest at 5:46 PM on December 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

"I love you, see you tomorrow" were also the last words Peter Bergman (of the Firesign Theatre) spoke on his Radio Free Oz podcast of March 6, 2012, concluding an impassioned speech reiterating his recurrent theme of, "We're going to make it, and we're going to make it together." He'd been keeping it secret but he'd been battling leukemia for years, and was hospitalized the next day for complications and died on March 9.
posted by Devoidoid at 6:12 PM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Real or not, I found a lot of them unsettling and immediately started dashing off brief emails to friends I've lost touch with.
posted by Napoleonic Terrier at 7:03 PM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: it did last me a long time while I was stuck on a train with my iPhone.
posted by lunasol at 7:05 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Why are so many people in this thread assuming that every entry is fake? Are we really that "wise" and "jaded" that we can't imagine that anything's genuine any more?
posted by kcds at 7:10 PM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

this was a hard read. No one knows what will be the last "word" ...ever. Make me think though...a so long from a lover is difficult. A message from someone close who just...up and dies...very painful. How does someone just die???? how is that normal? When I was 14, 20, 30...no one just died...
now they do at increasing frequency.
I have had so many losses over the last few years. I am 54...a former drug addict alcoholic....who by all accounts..should have been one of the first to go...and yet...here I am saying goodbye to people ..who have no frickin business dying. hey, I am happy to be still kickin it but sh^t...what are the odds? I don't like odds. My most very best friend died almost 3 years ago and I never had a chance to say goodbye. He..up and died choking on his ruptured throat...laying in a hallway I spoke to him less than two weeks before and all was fine. Two fucking days before he died he left a voice mail...AND I DELETED IT!!!!! Damn it all....He called to say "hey..want to catch up?.." I didn't have the time to return his call.
So that is what I am left with.
posted by shockingbluamp at 7:37 PM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

does anyone read the posts down here?

Yes. Isn't down here heavily a component of why this site exists?
posted by Chuffy at 8:19 PM on December 6, 2015

The last messages from people who died are very poignant, as are some of the breakup ones, but I have to be honest, it's not worth plowing through the pissy breakup ones to get to the moving ones IMO. (I have had to remove a bunch of tumblrs from my feed for much the same reason; sometimes it turns out that someone I followed is much more into a fandom that I don't care about than the one that I followed them for, sometimes they do nothing but reblog the same posts that half-a-dozen people in my feed have already reblogged, and sometimes they seem to be reblogging their entire lives--I honestly don't know where they find the time; they seem to generate as many posts per day as the couple hundred other people that I follow.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:46 PM on December 6, 2015

Best of wives and best of women.
posted by zachlipton at 9:27 PM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]

It's good to be skeptical about these compilation Tumblr things. I know someone who got a book deal off of a Tumblr where he claimed to post submissions from people who wanted to write one last one-liner to a former lover. Naturally he'd written almost every entry himself. They sold it at Urban Outfitters.
posted by Yoko Ono's Advice Column at 10:45 PM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Perhaps, but I still had to nope the fuck out of that site after this post. Too upsetting even if fake.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:14 AM on December 7, 2015

Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of young people here are dying randomly in their sleep?! I find this a really sad blog. I'm also reminded that if it happens to me, the last message I probably send him will read: Bread, milk, nappies, butter, fruit xx
posted by Jubey at 2:02 AM on December 7, 2015

Some of these were pretty hard to read. I always wonder what my last words to someone I love will be. Or the last things they say to me. Makes me want to say things to some people that I never thought I'd have to the heart to say.
posted by by3170 at 2:13 AM on December 7, 2015

See, I do believe most of these are true, because I have texted the same crappy and pathetic stuff to ex lovers and ex friends. It gave me an epiphany on who is worth my angst in my life right now and who is not.
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 3:35 AM on December 7, 2015

Chuffy: schmod's comment was a callback to a time when that wasn't yet true.
posted by daisyk at 3:45 AM on December 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Someone should compile a list of "final comments before a MeFi flameout".

That really only covers the "pissy exes" side of this. The unforeseen deaths side of the story... not so much. That would be harder to deal with, in every sense. Two months ago we lost Lemurrhea, and his last words on the site were a mixed recommendation of a restaurant in Toronto -- good food, lousy atmosphere -- which does not make for thought-provoking reading (sorry, Aaron). On the other hand, this final message from a mefite who was persuaded by the site to go seek medical attention is heartbreaking. That account is still open, but we are closing in on three years since she sent that message, and the inference is hard not to draw.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:18 AM on December 7, 2015 [6 favorites]

rakish_yet_centered: " http://mefiteslastwords.tumblr.com/"

Holy shit! Is that real?

Metafilter: “Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.”
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 7:05 AM on December 7, 2015

On the other hand, this final message from a mefite who was persuaded by the site to go seek medical attention is heartbreaking. That account is still open, but we are closing in on three years since she sent that message, and the inference is hard not to draw.

I'm hoping that she just got really busy with grad school.
posted by zamboni at 8:51 AM on December 7, 2015 [6 favorites]

If not and the outcome it what it seems it was from that thread, I hope her parents spend the rest of their days racked with guilt. Jesus but that was awful to read.
posted by holborne at 9:06 AM on December 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

I noticed that like 80-90% of those were posted by women. Is it that women are more introspective and dwell on those last messages more, or are they more likely to share things with others/strangers on the web than men? Or is it that men are more uncouth when breaking up via text or clumsily and halfheartedly trying to rekindle a relationship they're ambivalent about and have sabotaged in the past? All of the above? None of the above? Too many rhetorical questions?
posted by Devils Slide at 11:27 AM on December 7, 2015

The word "THATCHED" in letterpress.

.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:31 AM on December 7, 2015

Really worried about UniversityNomad now.
posted by delight at 4:57 PM on December 7, 2015 [5 favorites]