Lori Falce: What will your last words be?

“I love you, too.”

George H.W. Bush, who lost his wife Barbara seven months earlier, gave his last words to his son and fellow president George W. Bush.

“Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow,” Steve Jobs said before being claimed by cancer.

“Let me go to the house of the Father” were the final words spoken by Pope John Paul II.

People worry a lot today about the cameras that capture their images. Traffic cameras. Security cameras. Facial recognition software. In an Instagram era, anyone with a cellphone can capture your worst decision on a bad day and spread it out for the world to see or a quiet gesture you never intended to be public might be shared.

But we should worry more about our words, and we don’t.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in our world we have thousands of communications for every picture, and given all those cameras, that’s staggering.

And now those words are captured and shared and repeated and archived because of social media. There are about 500 million tweets sent on Twitter every day, and 317,000 status updates on Facebook every minute. That means that on any given day, you may be recording your epitaph without knowing it.

If you knew those would be your last words, would you think before you pressed send?

Andrew Breitbart was a passionate conservative firebrand, the force behind his eponymous website. His last known words in 2012 were clarifying a snide tweet to a law student. “I called you a putz cause I thought you werebeing (sic) intentionally disingenuous. If not I apologize.”

Would he have said something different if he knew he had once last chance to say something that would last?

Facebook posts on news articles tend to attract a long line of comments that often have little to do with the content and everything to do with wanting to get the last word on a topic. Regulars snipe at each other with comments that seem rehearsed and overused. There are no new insults in politics.

On June 29, 2015, my husband made his last post on Facebook. I didn’t hear the last words he spoke two days later because I wasn’t there he was intubated.

He shared a post from a friend of a friend, the kind of thing you do without thinking just because it speaks to you in some way. It was sandwiched between a quiz promising to tell you what comic book villain you would be (he was the Joker) and a health article — nothing different from any other Monday afternoon.

But the last words he shared with the world were a truth we could all learn.

“More people should think before they hate.”

Lots of people comment on stories I write or pieces I share, sometimes supportive or questioning, but sometimes angry or indignant or insulting.

I hope no one ever has to scroll through someone’s social media history and see something that makes them sad or hurt or ashamed of someone they loved. When I am tempted to the savage comebacks that make my fingers itch, I think about what my mother or my son would think if they read what I want to write.

I don’t know what my last words will be, and I hope they don’t come for a very long time, but I doubt actor Paul Walker realized, “Hey, let’s go for a drive” would be his last words before the Porsche crash that killed him, either. Our last words are seldom something we can plan.

Instead, we should weigh all of our words as though they might be our last. What do you want yours to be?