when scrolling through the names in my phone:
old acquaintances, old employers, parents of students and favorite stores I used to frequent.
He expresses exactly how I feel, in that keeping them remains a piece of my memory,
just like my old planners, old letters, and other such paraphernalia
I really should have junked years ago.
Somehow it is comforting that there are other people like me (and you Mom!) on this planet.
Why I Keep the Dearly Departed in My Address Book
By EDWARD ZUCKERMAN
Published: December 14, 2012
Heading into my golden years, I have one bad knee, two good daughters and 836 names in my iPhone address book. Of the latter, 246 are people I have not seen or spoken to in at least 10 years. Thirty-nine are a total mystery to me — I have no idea who they are.
Illustration by Holly Wales
Seventeen are dead.
Clearly, I am due for some housekeeping. The mystery names I can eliminate without a thought. Why keep them around just to remind myself that I am losing my memory, the one thing I do not need to be reminded of? I know I should erase as well the entries for those I haven’t seen for a decade or more, but my finger hesitates over the delete key. I mean, who knows? What if I suddenly have an article idea to pitch to a magazine editor I haven’t seen since 1986 (in the unlikely event both magazine and editor still exist)? Or, if I ever get divorced (speaking strictly hypothetically here, Dear), would I want to call the woman I took to see “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”? But those are the easy questions. The harder one: What to do about the dead?
I look at the names on the little screen and remember. Some were first entered when Nixon was president and have been faithfully and laboriously transferred a dozen times — from fraying paper address books to crisp new address books, to a primitive gizmo I bought in Japan, to “electronic organizers,” to a Windows address-book program, to a Palm Treo, to a Mac, to an iPhone. Now they reside as well “in the cloud.”
As do those 17 people.
They are an eclectic list, death’s random choices. A famous restaurateur. My cousin Henry, who somehow rode out the Holocaust in Bucharest and died years later in Israel. The sister-in-law of my partner in the killer-bee honey business. A college friend who became mentally ill and suffered paranoid delusions and, I was told, died literally of fright.
For all I know, there may be more than 17 dead. In 1970, fresh out of college myself, I taught at a junior college in Pennsylvania, where I befriended a student with the non-Googleable name Nancy Smith. I have carried her 1970 telephone number with me for 42 years. Is she still at that number? Is she alive? Nancy, where are you? Get in touch.
Over the years, I have kept my address list partly up-to-date, dutifully deleting several entries upon hearing bad news — an uncle who wore out at age 96; a college roommate who collapsed suddenly, horribly, unexpectedly, at 55; a Jamaican woman who cleaned my apartment when I lived in Queens 30 years ago. But now, as I consider completing my housecleaning by deleting those numbers, I realize I not only want to leave them untouched; I want to reinstate those previously erased.
I will never call any of those people again. I do not need their e-mail addresses (although they may still be operable — my own estate lawyer recently suggested I make arrangements for deleting my Facebook and AOL accounts post-mortem). But deleting the entries of the dead feels wrong, an irrevocable step toward forgetting them entirely, almost akin to killing them a second time. Gone, and then gone again.
There is also a selfish motive here. Remembering these people means remembering me. How I knew them, where I met them, what I was doing when their paths crossed mine. Every one of those names keeps some little piece of my own life alive — the bizarre phone calls I got from my paranoid friend as he painfully imploded but also the long nights we spent on the college newspaper, decades earlier, when black students seized the student union and we scrambled to cover a national news event. The jaunty accent and good humor of the Jamaican woman and the son she was proud of and worried about, and my isolation in the apartment she cleaned where I lived, alone, while writing a book. The holiday party at a deceased editor’s home in the 1970s when I told her husband that I wanted to be a freelance writer just like him, and he handed me the knife he was using to slice the turkey and said: “Here. Cut your throat now. It’ll be quicker.”
Is it disrespectful to keep the dead alive as mnemonic devices? Perhaps, but they don’t mind, and it matters to me. So they’re going to stay, lodged between my sister and the plumber and the guy down the block who thinks I should come to Jesus before it’s too late but is usually too polite to say so.
I sometimes wonder how many address books I am in.
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