Monday, August 17, 2015

Deletion and erasure


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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