What am I supposed to do about pending messages on a decommissioned cassandra node?

I am referring official documentation at

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for removing a node from a cassandra cluster.

After the node is decommissioned 'nodetool netstats' gives:

Mode: DECOMMISSIONED
Not sending any streams.
Read Repair Statistics:
Attempted: 0
Mismatch (Blocking): 0
Mismatch (Background): 0
Pool Name Active Pending Completed Dropped
Large messages n/a 4 0 0
Small messages n/a 4 21 0
Gossip messages n/a 0 132998 0

By looking at value of 'Mode', I feel that the node is successfully decommissioned/ removed. But I start doubting when I see there are 'Pending' messages.

I could not find any info about how can I interpret this info and what am I supposed to do?
Is the node really removed? Do I need to ensure that there are no pending messages? How can I?

If **nodetool status** on other nodes doesn't showing removed server, desregard the pending messages, there's not much you can do after the node is removed from the cluster.

Review **system.log**, and see if the node completed decommission successfully and if there were any errors, add them to question.