“Wake up and smell the coffee”

“Wake up and smell the coffee” is the message Margo Fairchild’s mother left her shortly before dying. In Margo’s account, the phrase is inseparable from the mother’s refusal to recognize her daughter as herself: a commonplace call to face reality becomes a final, intimate rejection.

The final message

Margo tells Eve Fletcher that her mother died of drug-resistant pneumonia, which developed from what had seemed to be a stubborn cold. After going to the emergency room with a persistent cough and shortness of breath, her mother was placed on a ventilator within twelve hours. She briefly rallied before her death, just long enough to write to the daughter who had once been a son.

The note began by telling Margo she was confused and ended with the instruction to wake up and smell the coffee. Its force comes from the circumstances of its delivery: Margo had completed her transition, and the words arrived as her mother’s last message rather than as the start of a conversation. There would be no later chance for Margo to explain herself or for her mother to reconsider.

Margo’s recollection

Margo recalls that she had told her mother how much she loved her before receiving the note. She identifies the coffee phrase as her mother’s dying words and tries, unsuccessfully, to smile as she recounts them. Love and rejection therefore occupy the same final exchange: Margo’s declaration of affection is followed by a message that treats her identity as confusion.

Eve advises Margo to try to forgive her mother, arguing that resentment toward the dead is unhealthy. Margo accepts the force of that advice, but still wishes she could speak with her mother once more and make her understand that she is a woman, not the “sad little boy” her mother seemed to see. The expression thus marks not only the loss of a parent but the explanation Margo never got to give.

A recurring language of rejection

The phrase belongs to a longer pattern Margo describes in her account of her mother. Her mother had a code word for Margo’s gender expression: “nonsense.” She used it when warning Margo not to look through her clothes, when noticing that Margo seemed sad, and when reacting to her engagement. Even after Margo had transitioned and was living as a woman, her mother asked whether she would stop with the “nonsense.”

That history sharpens the meaning of the final note. The coffee expression does not stand alone as an isolated outburst; it echoes a repeated refusal to accept Margo’s account of herself. Its ordinary, almost familiar wording contrasts with the irreversibility of the moment in which it was written. For Margo, the last message preserves her mother’s voice, but also the painful limit of what that voice could acknowledge.