Remembering our Lasts
I came across a powerful writeup of Roger Ebert in Esquire, the noted film critic, who has undergone a number of surgeries related to the cancer in his jaw. The result of these surgeries is that Ebert can no longer eat or speak. Despite this, he maintains his optimism and continues to write at Roger Ebert's Journal. Reading the Esquire writeup, I was particularly moved by this passage:
Roger Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He can't remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn't happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory — it wasn't as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz's ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren't they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.
Ebert's lasts almost certainly took place in a hospital. That much he can guess. His last food was probably nothing special, except that it was: hot soup in a brown plastic bowl; maybe some oatmeal; perhaps a saltine or some canned peaches. His last drink? Water, most likely, but maybe juice, again slurped out of plastic with the tinfoil lid peeled back. The last thing he said? Ebert thinks about it for a few moments, and then his eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he looks out into space in case the answer is floating in the air somewhere. It isn't. He looks surprised that he can't remember. He knows the last words Studs Terkel's wife, Ida, muttered when she was wheeled into the operating room ("Louis, what have you gotten me into now?"), but Ebert doesn't know what his own last words were. He thinks he probably said goodbye to Chaz before one of his own trips into the operating room, perhaps when he had parts of his salivary glands taken out — but that can't be right. He was back on TV after that operation. Whenever it was, the moment wasn't cinematic. His last words weren't recorded. There was just his voice, and then there wasn't.
Life is full of these lasts. Last time you ever roller-skated. Last time you ever ate anchovies. Last time you ever spoke to someone. Last time you passed through Idaho. Some of them are permanent lasts because you will never undo them (as in Ebert's case). Some may be temporary lasts, able to be overwritten. The problem with life is that you never know when the temporary last will become permanent. As of right now, however, you've already had countless number of permanent lasts recorded in the history of you. You just don't know it yet.
However, as memory and technology continue to race ahead, how long before we can recall any of these lasts and any other bit of information about our lives at any moment of any day? Would you want to remember? Would it inspire you to overwrite that last with a better one? How soon after the emergence of full memory recall technology would additional technologies emerge to help a brain to overwrite permanent lasts? How long before Ebert can overwrite his last hospital meal with one from Gene and Georgetti's?
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