The Contacts you Never Delete

So, a couple of months in and I have not yet turned off Bride’s phone, and I am not sure when I will.  We shifted to consumer cellular a couple of years ago and it is only about 20 bucks a month to keep it active so...  We both have the same code to get into our phones and iPads.  I had never looked in her phone before she passed, and I don’t think she ever looked in mine, even though we both had the codes.  I have been checking her phone daily for calls, voicemails, text messages, Amazon activities and any other form of communications looking for anything that needed attention.  There have been a few things that needed to be addressed in those first few weeks but nothing lately.

We had recently replaced her phone with the latest iPhone Max, the big one, the $1,500 one.   Before that, her phone was older than mine, an iPhone 7 from around 2017 or so I think.  We both hang on to them until they started giving us problems, so we always tried to get the newest thing they had out.  I have the Galaxie Note 20 Ultra that I got in 2020 and I’m on my second Otter Box case.  It still answers phone calls and texts along with email, when I feel like using it for that.  I have looked through her pics and email and what not, mostly because I saw the .99 cent charge for cloud storage come in.  I am working on getting that stuff moved off her account so I can at least stop paying that 99 cents a month for storage.  

Along those lines, this morning I was reviewing her contacts to see if I needed to transfer any of those to my contacts.  I found some and sent them over to me.  One thing I was not really prepared for was finding contact info on friends no longer with us.  My Mom and Dad were there, as was Debbie, Carol, and a couple of others.  That one stopped me for a moment, and pushed me to look through my contacts to find who all I still have in there.  It was too many, and now Bride sits on the top of that list, and that fucking sucks.  So do Lyndon and Alison, my two oldest friends.  I met Alison when I was 4 and Lyndon when I was 5, she died in 2013 and he died in 2015 and I still miss them both.  If you type in Mom, Dad, Lyndon, or Alison in the little search box up in the top left corner you can read some words I wrote about them.

There was Grady, and Cary, two friends who decided this life wound up to be too hard.  I was mad at both of them for a long time, but I think with age I have learned to accept that was the choice they made.  My Mom and Dad are still in there.  There is Bob, Bishop and Brian.  Chris,  Debbie, and Don.  Doug, Eric, and Jimmy.  Ken, Larry, and Mark.  Michael, Pat, and Peter.  Randy, Roy, and Russ.  Tim, Tracy, and Wayne.

Twenty eight names in total, just sitting there in my contacts.  People that I have simply kept their contact info in my phone, even though some have been gone for decades.  It was funny because at least a few I must have transferred their contact information from an address book.  For those younger folks, that was a cardboard bound binder with places where we put people’s names, phone numbers and addresses, along with any other pertinent information.  I always picked green ones, although I cannot recall why now but there must have been a reason.

That’s when it stopped feeling like just a list. A contact list isn’t just for finding folks, it’s also an archive of the ones who shaped our lives.  Keeping someone in our contacts feels like a small act of defiance.  Kinda like we’re just not willing to let them disappear.  We spend years, in some cases a lifetime, building connections to those who end up being in our circle of humans.  We used to memorize the numbers of those closest to us, for example, I recall Lyndon’s number when we were kids being 513.663.6382. 

Now when their name pops up on our device with a text or call, we associate it with a voice, a laugh, or some memory and our heart does a little dance, especially if we have not heard from them in a while.  Deleting that name can feel like collapsing all of that history into a single, final button mash.  Leaving it in there lets the relationship breathe, exist in a different state, not active, but not erased either.  Just different.

It lines up with how memory actually works, at least for me.  Grief is not linear, and connection isn’t either.  Some days I don’t even think about them at all, other days their name pops up unexpectedly via some random trigger.  When they pop up, it can bring back a flood of memories I didn’t even realize I was carrying.  Seeing their contact does not anchor me in the past, it just keeps the electronic door open for me.  Not to stay there, but to revisit from time to time, long enough to share a laugh or even a cry with them, like what happened to me as I looked through it today.  The relationship changes, it goes from talking to them to pondering about them. 

There is something real about how our contacts list keeps growing while some of those names will never be called again, a pretty stark reality for a “contact” list.  Life keeps adding chapters but does not delete the old chapters.  Those old chapters just take on a different weight.  It almost becomes a map of all the intersections in our lives, showing where we met that first friend and how the list grew from there.  The map is also marked with the moments in time and place where folks got off our ride.  Keeping them in there acknowledges that those relationships did not end in importance to us, they ended because they ended in time.

Maybe most of all, it’s about control in a moment where so much feels out of our control.  Choosing not to delete a name is a deliberate act, as is deleting one.  I don’t think it’s denial at all, I think it is more about choosing what stays.  It is a decision they still belong in our world, even if the way they exist in it has changed.  Their name sitting there when ya scroll, as hard as it might be, shows how much that particular human meant to us when they were here.

Maybe there is a right time to remove someone, and for me I guess I learned that time is never going to be right.  Keeping them in there isn’t about reaching out, it’s just not being ready to let them go.  Who do you have in your contacts?

This is Bride's phone