Writing entries for this blog, I
sometimes bump up against this imaginary, but somehow very weighty, line between
what’s appropriately “open” as I explore my experiences of retirement, aging,
and life in general and what’s “too personal.” In recent weeks, I’ve been
thinking about a topic that hangs right close to that line, making me hesitant
to discuss it here. But it seems important as part of the complexity of life as
I get old, so here I go. It’s about death. Not death in general, but the death
of someone who holds a singular place in my life, and about questions her dying
has raised that haven’t been raised in the same way by earlier losses.
One of our trips this summer was to a
memorial service, a “celebration of life,” for one of my sisters. She had died in
January after a long decline from a head injury, so her death was not a
surprise. But it was, as these things tend to be, a shock nevertheless. She
lived in Oregon, and we hadn’t been particularly close, but we had kept in
touch over the years—mostly by email, often sharing political rants. I had
visited her last November, knowing it would likely be the last time we talked. So it was some time after her death when gathered with other family members last month to scatter her ashes in the ocean off
Ecola Beach, her favorite stretch of the Oregon coast. The wind made it
impossible to cast them out over the ocean, so we took turns tipping her ashes from
the container into a little inlet so that they would wash into the sea.
Just after we got home from that trip, I received a reminder email from an e-card company that my sister’s birthday was coming up. This reminder would usually trigger a rather casual process of finding an appropriate card and crafting a birthday message. In earlier years, when she was still communicative, I’d likely have sent her an email, too. If it was a “major” birthday, I might have sent flowers. But this time, it was different—and not just because I wouldn’t be sending the card. Seeing her name in that email stopped me in my tracks. I was stunned, paralyzed for a moment. The message offered me the option to “remove this reminder” for future years. Staring at the screen, I thought of a column I had very recently read called “My Digital Cemetery.”
The column I was recalling talks about the dilemma of how to manage digital “contacts” when someone dies.
It’s a thought-provoking piece, which I recommend, not because it has answers,
but because it so makes you think about the meaning of identities and of
relationships—and of what happens to those entities when someone dies. It’s
couched in digital terms, but the questions are far squishier than the title
suggests. When I first read it, I set it aside, thinking I might blog about it
at some point.
Now, seeing my sister’s name and being
offered the option to delete it, I noticed my internal monologue. How could I remove her name, remove her from this list? That would imply … acknowledge … that she isn’t any longer. But why not remove it? There is no logical point
in continuing to be reminded of a birthday that isn’t any longer. Besides, I don’t really need reminders of her
presence in my life (for all of my life). With no digital record of their
existence, I still feel a twinge when I see or hear the birthdate of other
family members who’ve died (and there are now four).
I went back to the article, hoping it
would help me think this through. The author, Rob Walker, a tech writer for the
New York Times, talks about the names
in his digital files as a catalog not only of contacts but of his personal
history. Each name, he says, is a reminder of a person, a relationship,
experiences that collectively make up his own past. He admits that he does
occasionally delete names—but never those of people who have died. He
attributes this to the sense that erasing those names would be participating in
the impression that they were gone, whereas in truth, they live on as part of
his own history. “What I’ve lost is part of who
I am,” he writes. “So is what I choose to save.”
But here’s what still puzzles me: Why,
then, is it easier to erase the names of people who are still alive? They, too,
have contributed to who I am, what I have experienced. They, too, are part of my
history. It must be that death changes the meaning of these markers of
someone’s (prior) existence by adding the reality of their (current) non-existence. It’s the simultaneous realization of both states of
being that is so troubling, that makes the reminders startling in the short
term and twinge-inducing as time goes on.
She’s gone, I say to myself, so why not
delete her contact information? It serves no purpose. But, I reply, what does
it mean if I do remove it? But if coming across her name occasionally makes me
sad, then why would I want to keep it in my list? Or do I need to feel sad? Is
that very sadness, the shock or twinge, such an appropriate response to loss that
trying to avoid it amounts to negating the importance of relationships? Maybe
this is the difference between deleting living and deleting dead contacts: coming
across the names of still-living people doesn’t usually elicit great sadness,
so deleting them isn’t an act of avoidance. But coming across the names of
people who have died can cause a sense of great existential loss—the awareness
of something deeply, finally, and irretrievably gone. And that feeling keeps
alive the duality of loss and life, allowing us to live with relationships that
have ended. Deleting those names amounts to erasing the possibility of moments
like the one I experienced, moments that keep present the truth of a now-gone
relationship.
I know that plenty of philosophers have
explored this existential moment—I did the requisite stint as an avid
existentialist in college. I also know that authors, poets, playwrights, musicians,
artists, and spiritual teachers have mined this moment in far greater depth
than I ever will. But oddly, none of that prepared me for the particular,
peculiar moment when I saw my sister’s name, Judy, and was asked whether I
wanted to delete it.
I have no answers here. Just musings. And
Judy’s contact information, still in my phone.
© Janis
Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to
the post.
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