One Question That Is Still Bugging HIMYM Fans (No, It’s Not the Pineapple)

How I Met Your Mother has had a lot of enigmas woven into the plot over the course of nearly a decade.

While we do find out the answers to most of them by the series finale (like who the mother is) or even by the season 1 finale of the sequel, How I Met Your Father (like where Ted got that pineapple), some remain a mystery.

One of the most important questions left unanswered is the cause of Tracy’s death. The existence of Tracy in the first place is the whole point of the show.

How I Met Your Mother has been building up to Ted and Tracy’s meet-cute for nine legen-wait-for-it-dary seasons, only to dismiss the mother altogether in the end.

We get a mere glimpse of Tracy’s life before Ted and how she met him, although that episode is enough to make us all fall in love with her.

Season 9 also offers some backstory on how the mother met and interacted with the rest of the gang – Tracy calms Lily down, picks up Marshall in the truck, gives Barney life-altering advice, and even talks Robin out of becoming a runaway bride. She is a pretty major character, isn’t she?

Yet, apparently not major enough to tell the viewers how she died. It’s bad enough that the HIMYM writers killed off Tracy so quickly to finish her and Ted’s great love story with a tragedy and have him end up with Robin after all, but they could have at least had the decency to give Tracy a proper send-off and disclose the disease.

The only thing that we know about it is that it was terminal from the beginning, but it took Tracy some time to get worse.

She passed away in 2024, but she felt well enough to travel with Ted from New York to Farhampton that same year (and they already knew that she was sick by that time).

How I Met Your Father has yet to be renewed for season 3. If it does, we’ll need it to somehow reveal Tracy’s mysterious disease. After all, the show gave the fans a confirmation that Ted had stolen the pineapple from the Captain’s porch in 2005 (there was a deleted scene featuring that before, but now it’s canon), why can’t it do one more thing for the oldies?