It’s funny how a taste can hit you and suddenly you’re not in your kitchen anymore. You’re in a different decade, a different apartment, standing in front of a different person, having the same fight you always had.
For me, that taste was Tab.
For those too young to remember, Tab was Coca-Cola’s first diet soda—a pink-canistered, saccharine-sweet, slightly metallic-tasting relic of the 1970s and 80s. It wasn’t just a drink; it was a cultural signifier. It was the soda of women in aerobics classes, of mothers counting calories before “wellness” was a word, of a specific kind of chemically engineered optimism.
Coca-Cola discontinued Tab in 2020, a quiet casualty of the pandemic’s supply chain purge. But the memory of it is still fizzing in my brain, because the last can of Tab I ever drank wasn’t just a soda. It was the centerpiece of the biggest fight my wife and I ever had about things.
It started, as most minor marital disputes do, in the garage.
I was cleaning out a storage bin and found a single, dented can of Tab. It was a relic from a decade earlier, a six-pack my mother had left at our house during a visit in 2012. She was a die-hard Tab drinker—a habit she’d maintained since the Nixon administration. My wife, Sarah, thought it was disgusting. “It tastes like pennies and regret,” she’d say.
But when I found that last can, something clicked in me. My mom had passed away two years prior. Holding that pink can felt like holding a piece of her. I brought it inside and put it on the kitchen counter.
“What is that?” Sarah asked, eyeing it like it was a biohazard.
“The last Tab on Earth,” I said, only half-joking.
“Please tell me you’re not going to drink it.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. It’s probably still good.”
“It expired in 2013, Dan.”
“It’s a collectible now. They don’t make it anymore.”
Sarah sighed. “So it’s garbage that’s also a collectible. Great.”
I laughed. She didn’t.
The debate raged for weeks. I kept the can on my desk, a little pink totem. Sarah refused to acknowledge it. Friends came over and saw it. Some got it immediately—their own mothers or grandmothers drank Tab. Others thought I was hoarding trash.
One night, after a few glasses of wine, Sarah finally snapped.
“Why is that can still in this house?” she asked. “It’s not your mother. It’s not a memory. It’s just a can of soda that’s going to leak aspartame all over your keyboard.”
“It’s not about the soda,” I said. “It’s about what it represents.”
“And what does it represent, Dan? A time when women were told to smoke cigarettes and drink chemicals to stay thin? A time when your mom drank six of those a day and then wondered why she had migraines?”
I felt the air leave the room.
Sarah continued, softer now. “I loved your mom. You know I did. But she didn’t love herself. And every time I see that can, I think about how she used to call herself ‘fat’ when she weighed 110 pounds. How she’d order a Tab at a restaurant and push her food around her plate. That’s not a legacy I want sitting on our kitchen counter.”
I stared at the can. The pink design looked different now. Less nostalgic, more like a warning label.
We didn’t speak for two days. Not out of anger, exactly, but out of the exhaustion of finally saying the quiet part out loud. My mother was a wonderful woman, but she was also a product of a time that taught women their worth was measured in ounces and inches. Tab was the poison she chose, and she drank it with a smile.
When I finally broke the silence, I said, “You’re right. It’s not about the soda.”
Sarah looked up from her book. “Then what is it about?”
“It’s about missing her. And being angry at her. And not knowing what to do with either of those things.”
She put the book down. “So we keep the can. But we don’t worship it. We put it somewhere where it’s not the first thing you see every morning.”
We ended up putting the can in a shadow box, along with a photo of my mom at the beach in 1985, laughing, holding a Tab. It’s in the hallway now, next to the bookshelf. It’s not a shrine. It’s an acknowledgment. A relic of a complicated love.
Tab is gone now. Discontinued. A victim of changing tastes and a global pandemic. But the can in my hallway still holds its shape, still holds its fizz, still holds the memory of a woman who drank it while she counted her sins and her calories in equal measure.
Sometimes I look at it and smile. Sometimes I look at it and feel a pang of grief for a generation of women who never learned to be hungry for anything but approval.
And every time Sarah walks by it, she gives it a little nod, as if to say, I see you. I’m not afraid of you anymore.
We never did open that can. Some things are better left un-tasted. The memory, it turns out, is stronger than the soda ever was.