When I read through the plain text version of z408 I read the last line as:

"Before I meet the piti(y)".

I guess my brain just unscrambled it.

Some complete guesses to support this solution.

1. It makes totally sense in the context.
2. The word before is used after afterlife in the same sentence. Creating a bit of a poetic touch.
3. Piti, a misspelling of pity that would be an unusal misspellning normally but for Zodiac a typical one.
4. It’s 18 letters long and could have fitted perfectly.
5. If you wanted to fit words to all of the cipher I guess it’s not a bad idea to put the last words down first. So maybe after entering "afterlife" you would enter "the pity". And then work from both directions or maybe backwards to make the last words up. This would take a longer time to do than the previous parts and may explain the high number of errors.