He outlived his parents. He was ten.
He outlived his adoptive family, thirty.
He outlived his siblings, twenty one and forty.
He outlived his wife, fifty two.
He outlived his own children, eighty one.
The world was cruel. He outlived even his young children, who could not be called young anymore. They were fifty nine and fifty seven, they had wives, kids, even grandkids.
In the end, his grandkids moved on, no one came to visit him no more, not even the neighbors who invited him for dinner when he had it the hardest, not even the electricity or gas bill. He stopped using them.
He was going to sleep before the sun, he woke up after the sun. He cleaned his bed, he changed, he wiped the sweat off and then went to the bathroom. The doctor told him he should eat more liquid food and to use the cane to move around, but he was stubborn, he always left it in his room.
The only people who still came to his house were kids from families near him for stories of his life and caramel candies he always had for them. They usually told him to write a book, so he decided to do it.
By the time he finished it, the kids who used to visit him became teenagers. Once he found an editor who was kind enough to help him publish it online, he spend all of his savings on the book, even added the editor in his will.
Not long after he got to read his own book in a store, he turned ninety. He bought it and read it again and again, usually crying on the bed at the memories he only had left. How his parents died because of the second world war, from the lack of food, how his adoptive parents gave love to him and his sister. How he grew with his step brother until his brother died protecting his sister, how his new parents died, one from a disease that medicine could not fix at the time, yet in the same year the other one died from a failed robbery and assault. How his sister died during the birth of his third nephew. How he met the most wonderful woman of his life, who listen to him cry at night while thinking about his family, who baked for him cakes and cupcakes when he got mad, who helped him start walking again, after the disease put him to the hospital, who cried in the waiting room, who hugged him the moment he left that room. He wrote about his two lovely kids who he treated like a friend than instead of just kids. Who lived happy lives, had break ups he helped them with, had bad times where he covered for them. All the the times that he held his grandkids on his lap, telling them stories of his younger age, telling them how sweet wet bread slices with sugar were, how he had to drink onion tea, how he had to put around his forehead potatoes when he had a cold.
It was hard, getting forgotten. The only thing he had left to tell his story was that book who only got three sells over two years.
Three more years passed. He had to sit in a nursing home because he couldn't move as the disease came back and he did not have the money to pay for the treatments. He was going to die and the closest person to him now was the nurse who took care of him.
The last goodbye was not said by him, but by the editor, who finally sold two hundred thousand copies, two years after his death. For some reason, the story he wrote caught the attention of a young boy who could feel the weight of emotions put in that book. He grew up just to make the book popular, he rewrote small pieces and modified the writing style, but he didn't change any bits of the story. He was the second person to ever buy that book. Him with the help of the first buyer, a girl two years younger than him, a girl who always went to hear his stories when she lived close to him, even when her parents told her to stop doing so.
She was there at his funeral. Only she cried. The boy who barely just touched the book only started his work after they met with the editor. He said he saw the potential in it, so he, together with the editor and the girl got it made anew.
The sad story came as a hit between teenagers who felt close to the end themselves and the matures who already lost someone dear, even those who did not felt the weight and gave it a try.
In the end, the girl wrote a book herself too, not about her life alone, but the story of how she met him, how sweet the candies he gave her were, to the point where a few kids even spit them out on the floor of his room, how she got held in his arms and everything else she did together with those kids.
By the end, the story of the men whose last goodbyes were from his editor became a story she read to her grandkids before bed, now alone with them herself.