From ‘mama’ to ‘farewell’
What do we say at the start of our lives—and at the end? In his book Bye Bye I Love You, linguist Michael Erard from the Faculty of Law explores the story behind our first and last words.
One morning in Maine in 2012, Michael Erard was walking in the woods when his peace was abruptly shattered. He had stumbled upon the remains of a woman. Later he learned she’d been homeless, struggling with addiction, and had died alone. The cause of death remained unknown.
That shocking discovery, combined with becoming a father for the first time, prompted him to write Bye Bye I Love You. “When I found that woman, I was unsettled and needed to make sense of it,” he says. ''I became interested in pairing the beginning of language with the end of it. But it wasn’t until I had read extensively about death, trying to make sense of the discovery I had made in the woods, that I felt ready to embark on that project.''
What was left unsaid
Erard had been intrigued by language since childhood. He grew up around the US in a loving but reserved family. “As a child, I could sense when something was happening, yet no words were given to it. One example is when my father came back from the war in Vietnam, deeply changed and damaged by the experience. There were things he couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate. That shaped me. I was constantly trying to understand what was left unsaid. I thought if I could learn the rules of language, maybe I could make other people more understandable to me, and vice versa.”
It is no surprise that Erard went on to study linguistics and language, eventually earning his PhD. Since then, his career has followed a two-track path. “One is working with academics on research proposals, as I’m now doing for Maastricht University. That gives me the support and structure for my other track: writing. Most of my work is about language and the people who use it.”
Pure luck
Erard began reading about anthropology and birth, death, dying and burial practices. He also went looking for data. “The idea of a person’s final words hadn’t really been studied before, so that was a challenge. It was pure luck that I came across an archive in Montreal with records from a study conducted over 125 years ago, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Among the notes by doctors and nurses were descriptions of what people said and did as they were dying.”
Interaction window
Contrary to what many people imagine, our first and last words are often simple or even unclear. “Take ‘mama’ and ‘dada,’ where a baby doesn’t even understand what it’s saying. And beautiful, iconic last sentences, such as Oscar Wilde’s ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting …’ Those are exceptions. Most people are silent, speak gibberish or just make noises. As someone dies, their window for interaction begins to close. It opens when we’re babies and remains throughout our lives, until it gradually narrows again at the end.”
His advice: have meaningful conversations while that window is open. “And respect the importance of presence at the end of life. Humans are built for back-and-forth interaction. Even at the end, that obligation remains. Sometimes simply being physically present keeps someone alive, because the body responds to the reminder of interaction. But at a certain point, stepping away—for example, by leaving the room—can allow the dying person to let go. In that moment, they seem to understand: you’ve stepped away, now I can step away too.”
Not ready
The book was also meant to cover the future of last words and how technology might change them, but Erard decided to save that for a separate project. He offers a glimpse: “Eventually, brain–computer interface devices will become cheap and easy enough to use with dying people who are unresponsive. But ethically, legally and personally, we’re not ready. What happens if such a person responds? How do we judge capacity in that situation? What is the legal status of those words? Could people change their will with them? We don’t know yet. What we certainly need are clearer frameworks for assessing capacity linguistically.”
Bag of soil
What does his own future look like? “I’d love to build a research programme around end-of-life communication, ethics and rituals. In the shorter term, I’m thinking about a book specifically on ritual last words. Some major religions prescribe words to be spoken at the moment of death. In Islam, for instance, it’s the shahada—‘There is no God but God.’ It’s the first thing whispered into a baby’s ear, and ideally the last thing a person says before they die. I want to know how often families actually carry out these rituals, because in practice they’re often adapted, improvised or even forgotten.”
Erard is no stranger to this himself. “Some people from Texas living outside the state want their children to be born on Texan soil. My wife and I are not Texan nationalists, but we thought it’d be fun to do, so we had soil from her great-grandparents’ farm. But during the birth we forgot all about it, and it immediately faded in importance. Now the bag of soil just sits in our garage.”
Text Milou Schreuders
Photography Philip Driessen
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