Dying of meningitis at the age of thirty-three, Brian Henry breathed his last in a run-down hotel room on Bleecker Street. According to his neighbor, a young prostitute named Lilly who cared for him until his death, he always wanted to visit Trinity, New Mexico, birthplace of the atom bomb. When he died, that's where Lilly assumed he was headed.

A successful stock broker, Stewart Holcombe was working on Wall Street in 2008 when the stock market collapsed. He lost most of his fortune but swore he would get it back. Three years later, having almost recovered his losses, he was hit by a taxi near Zuccotti Park. The taxi driver was a school teacher who had lost his job during the recession.

Avid collector of sports memoribilia, Rod Franken, 42, died of a stroke while bidding on a 1933 Lou Gehrig rookie card at an auction in Newark, New Jersey. Although he lost his bid, he managed to wrest the card from the auctioneer and clasp it to his heart before collapsing onto the floor. His widow bought the card a week later online, and Rod was buried with it.

Long-time alcoholic and gay Lothario, Maggie "Bullfinch" Butler had a standing bet that no one, male or female, could outdrink her. Put to the test, she faced off with an unknown woman in an East Side bar and drank thirty-six shots of tequila in twenty minutes. She died of alcohol poisoning, as did her challenger, a housewife from Brooklyn. No one collected the ten dollar bet.

Mrs. Hillie Ingram, newly widowed and living on Park Avenue, expired two hours after brewing her nightly tea using her late husband's digitalis instead of her usual Earl Gray. Her housekeeper, who was the only witness, found the delirious woman sitting upright in bed when she spoke her last words. The empty cup, with its monogram "H.I.," was in her left hand.

Broadcast on internet radio, Allan Bodenko's last words came after a two hour diatribe on the commercialization of holidays and the need to keep the spirit of Santa Claus alive. Spoken from his Forest Hills hospital bed while chain-smoking Pall Malls, Bodenko hacked and wheezed his way through a meandering speech that had no clear beginning or end. His recording, a parting gift to his eldest son, had two million plays in three days.

No one knows who Franklin was, and many among Edward Hammer's friends and associates believe he never existed. But this did not stop Mr. Hammer from dictating a long list of mundane chores to be completed on his property in Long Beach after his death. These chores included raking the yard, washing the dishes, vacuuming the house, and cleaning all the bathroom mirrors. None of these chores were done because Franklin, if he existed, never received his commands.

These words were written by Language poet Lizzie Finnigan just before she died in her sleep at the age of eighty-four. With limited publications, and mostly ignored during her lifetime, she spent her final days writing poetry in a rest home in Yonkers. Upon her death, nursing aides found a suitcase under her bed which contained one thousand poems divided into bundles neatly tied up in blue ribbons. The last poem, with its single, incomprehensible line, lay on top.