The last text message 13-year-old Griffin McGrath received on his cell phone the night of Feb. 14, 2018, read “Please don’t be dead.”
It was a futile plea.
Griffin — nicknamed Bubba — was a middle school student in Middleton the night he died in his bedroom while texting friends and engaging in an online challenge that encouraged restricting oxygen and blood flow to the brain.
The last thing Griffin did before heading upstairs to his bedroom that night was ask his mom, Annie McGrath, for a math problem — he was preparing for an upcoming national math competition.
“Five,” Griffin said, solving the problem. “Thanks, Mom.”
Those were the last words she ever heard from her son. But they were not, as it turned out, his last message to her.
Griffin McGrath
13-year-old Griffin McGrath died in 2018.
Annie McGrath is a Madison native and a local branch manager for Wisconsin Bank & Trust. Some three months after Griffin’s death, McGrath, grief-stricken, barely able to venture out for groceries, found a prose-poem Griffin had composed two weeks before he died. She’d put it in a drawer, thinking she’d read it later, but had not.