Is There a Word for This?

[akirlu]

...the feeling of being simultaneously melancholy and creeped out, as in when you're clearing out some of your gargantuan backlog of unfiled e-mails, and come across messages from people who are dead now? They're still as breathlessly immediate as the day I got them. I cannot bring myself to delete any of those, however trivial. It seems dismissive, disrespectful, to just cast them into the outer darkness of forgetting. Am I psycho, or what?

Comments

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Definitely not psycho. I haven't deleted two people from my electronic address book who are dead because somehow, well, I just haven't. And I've saved some email messages from my ex-husband, who's been dead for over 2 years now. It's a sort of final step, somehow. I know exactly what you mean. (Although I do think that the people who keep a deceased person's voice on their active answering machine are going a little too far.)

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I haven't deleted two people from my electronic address book who are dead because somehow, well, I just haven't.

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

[damienw]

I keep letters, gifts, books I received from dead people. I keep the email too.

Doesn't stop me crying when I read it, though.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

When I was informed that George Alec Effinger had died, the first thing I did was dig up my trove of letters from him and read them. Crying was definitely part of that experience, but I found some comfort in it as well.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No.

For years I was afraid to write letters, because of the permanent immdiacy of them. I've even written a poem about the problem (of which only the kernal is worth keeping... yearbooks, and old love letters; left with the last page first).

A letter (even in e-mail) is a crystalised moment.

I recently came upon letters Maia sent me, after I deployed but before I was overseas. Painful. Reading the stuff I wrote then... well part of the reason I wrote it was to remember. Seeing it in Chunga today was more potent than the photos I was scanning from Walter Reed.

We are evanescent, and memory is all that survives us (any afterlife is ineffable) so those who were dear, and are gone, who wants to let them go completely.

As you said, it is the outer darkness.

I'm just glad I'm not in that list.

Love,

Terry

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a lot of us, me included, are very glad you are not on the list.

Love,

me

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, you are not psycho.

For years I didn't write letters because of that sense of permanent immediacy. They (even e-mail) are moments of crystalised time. I've even written a poem about it (though only the kernal [yearbooks, and old love letters, left with the last page first] is worth anything).

A few weeks ago I came across some letters Maia had sent me, after I deployed; before I left the states. Still powerful.

The snippet I saw in Chunga, as I was using it to flatten some 6x6cm transparencies from Walter Reed was more affective than the pictures.

Barring the unknowable afterlife, memory is all we have to survive us, and who wants, as you so rightly put it, to cast a friend into the outer darkness.

So, file them, print them, keep them in the odd corners of your heart. Someday you too will live in someone's memories, a tiny bit of the essential you, wafting like perfume down their lifetimes.

Love,

Terry

[daveon.livejournal.com]

No, it's natural. When I used to work in recruitment you'd usually call somebody once a year or so who had died. It's a rather difficult moment for all involved.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

I keep them. Filed separately, some of time, but it's an extended way to remember them.

I file dead people

[amy-thomson.livejournal.com]

My rolodex is full of dead people's addresses and phone numbers, some of the people have been gone for twenty years or more. I refuse to clean them out. It's a way of paying tribute, and sometimes, just for a microsecond, I can pretend that I really could call them up and say Hi.

And since the current meme involves inflicting poetry on people, here's a topical one by Wendell Berry:

A Meeting

In a dream I meet,
my dead friend, He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."

For some reason, this poem always makes me think of Terry Carr.

Re: I file dead people

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I wish I had known Terry Carr. But yeah, now that you mention it, I have dead people I keep in my rolodex, too. A couple of old favorite professors are there. I like coming across them there, being reminded.

Re: I file dead people

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I'm definitely the odd man out here.....ack, what's wrong with me??

Re: I file dead people

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for the poem "A Meeting". I've never seen it before and its really perfect. And my friend loved trees.

Re: I file dead people

[amy-thomson.livejournal.com]

Glad to have brightened your day!

[ssprince.livejournal.com]

I just checked, and yes, AT is still in my palm pilot. Cluttered, but I want to remember her, and not by asking which curve on Springfield Rd killed her.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Have you finished grieving them yet? If you have, why not delete them? Has there been enough time since they passed away? Jeff passed away in January and it was only two months ago that I took him out of my address book and changed the cell phone to just say Sue. Definitely creeped me out, but I found it was creeping me out even more whenever I e-mailed or called sue to see "Jeff & Sue Stone".

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

So far, I have undeleted email messages from only one dead person. I doubt I'll ever delete those messages, since that friend never sent me any physical mail, so those messages are the only record I have of his particular wiseass voice, in my life from age 18 to age 47 and now always silent. The email messages are a bit more unsettling than the physical letters I have from other deceased friends, perhaps because it's easier to come across them in the middle of other stuff. I don't find myself reading letters from E. when trying to figure out when a meeting is scheduled or what I did with that URL I really needed, but there is C., just as if he weren't going to be dead in six weeks. Damn bastard.

As always, the psycho question is separate.

[fritz-freiheit.livejournal.com]

I think that your habits with respect to email should determine how you treat someone who has died emails. If you keep emails in general, then there is no particular reason to delete them. If you delete emails in general, then I think should feel OK about deleting them. Just be careful not to do something that you can't take back that you might feel differently about when the grieving process has progressed. (Originally in response to Jenn's response to this.)