Press kit for Michael Erard/Bye Bye I Love You

I wanted to know: what really happens at the end of life, and how do people really communicate? “Last words” is a small part of how language at the end of life works and what we use a closing interaction window for. I delve into all this in the book, even though linguists haven’t ventured into this topic at all before.

First and last words have a lot in common, and they can shed light on each other from linguistic, historical, and cultural perspectives. Putting them side by side allows you to see things you wouldn’t have, if you’d only looked at them in isolation. They’re both linguistic milestones in which nature (as in biological processes) and culture (as in the default models for making sense of the world that we possess) are intertwined. And both accrue an extra weight thanks to the existential gravity that's attributed to beginnings and endings. We expect things to be a certain way, based on our beliefs and practices, and in some ways haven't faced up to the fact that they can't be that way, not always--and that that's what's normal about them. In this, first words and last words--or, better phrased, early language and language at the end of life--are quite unlike any other aspect of language in our lives, even as they’re utterly ordinary. I’m not saying that language at the beginning and of life is the same or that you can predict one from the other. They’re not mirrors of each other, but echoes. 

I’m a writer and linguist. I’m originally American and moved from New England to the Netherlands with my family in 2019. We maintain roots in Maine and Texas—lobster barbecue, anyone? Here’s a picture of my childhood home in Colorado.

For about twenty years, my work appeared in the key of journalism, and while I continue to write creative nonfiction, my work is shifting and becoming more academic. From 2008-2013 I was a senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute. To enable my nonfiction writing, I’ve worked as an editor and grants consultant for over a decade.

According to my mother, they were “money” and “dubbaday,” a nonsense word that she thought referred to the American publishing house, Doubleday.

I’ve had numerous people dear to me pass away, but the only deathbeds I’ve been at (thus far) have been two grandmothers. Bye Bye I Love You is written for people like me: what should you know ahead of time? Also, I believe that knowing what is normal can free us from guilt and also help us do a little better when it comes to dealing with this transition. As another step in this journey, in the fall of 2024 I began a foundations course to become an end-of-life doula.

I was raised Roman Catholic, so I’m a fluent speaker of Catholicism. It was inspiring—I still feel connected to the social justice mission of the church—but also stifling. “Having faith” came to mean subservience to being gaslit, which I rejected. For a long time, I would say I was anti-religious and tried to shake off those early influences. My wife and I attended a Friends meeting for several years, which I enjoyed as much as I could as a non-theist. (I admire the social justice principles of the Quakers and also the non-hierarchical nature of the community.) The experiences that I describe at the beginning of Bye Bye I Love You showed me a path that could be ritual positive, personal, and materialist. I call myself “post-Christian, ritual positive.”  

I received grants from the Sloan Foundation as well as a Public Scholars Fellowship from the US National Endowment for the Humanities. A travel grant from the William Osler Medical Archive helped. Of course, I couldn’t have done this without a year at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which changed my life.

If you ask me this question, I’ll know you didn’t read the book.