I am somewhat slovenly when it comes to keeping my email accounts up-to-date and from time-to-time I feel compelled to delete the ones I really should have deleted a very long time ago. Today was that day and while ploughing through literally hundreds of emails, almost all junk of some description, I found a good number from people who are no longer with us. It was the modern day equivalent, I guess, of finding an old letter from a much-loved relative or friend. Among the emails were several from written, and sent by, an old friend who died unexpectedly a few days after sending them. For as long as the blink of an eye, it was as if he was with us again before the grim reality returned. But what should I do with these emails? Should I keep them or hit the delete button?
On a near daily basis, I come across Facebook ‘friends’ who have also shuffled off their mortal coils. Sometimes, I am invited to donate to a charity that was supported by my deceased friend and up comes their name. Or perhaps I come across a greeting such as ‘Happy Heavenly Birthday’ on their account, which is all rather sweet, although it does rather assume that in Heaven the internet providers are a little more competent than they are here on Earth.
The dilemma for me is what to do with the emails and messages from the departed and the fact that I still have (quite a few) Facebook ‘friends’ who have died. Or rather, that was what the dilemma used to be. Nowadays, it’s all rather simple.
I am defying the ageing process by using Facebook less and less. Where my fellow geriatrics use Facebook more and more as they stumble towards Heaven’s door, I have pared back my account and include only people I actually know, rather than people I have simply met on social media and nowhere else. Now I appreciate that Facebook friends are not always the same as real friends, like the ones you actually see on at least a casual basis once in a while, but I do find it hard to exchange pleasantries with those who are to all intents and purposes complete strangers. When Facebook ‘friends’ I didn’t really know died, I put the boot in by ‘unfriending’ them, too. That no longer happens because I am no longer friends with people I don’t know. But the people I did know, well, I’ve kept most of them as friends.
Some of those who have departed have had their social media accounts deactivated, others remain. And I have decided to keep them as friends until such time as I stop using my only account.
The emails, I have sorted into a new section, provisionally called ‘dead people’. Hopefully, I can come up with something catchier and more respectful, but I have to say it’s been rather lovely looking at old messages. As we always say, people die but the memories remain and as I rearranged my accounts, my few remaining brain cells lurched into action as I remembered things tucked away at the back of my brain.
I don’t intend to make a habit of resurrecting messages from the dead, but I don’t have it in me to delete them just yet. Perhaps I never will.
I’m more of an analogue man, myself, preferring books to Kindles and letters to emails, although I have not actually written a letter in what must be decades. But the modern world has still come up with ways of remembering those who are no longer with us and I am grateful for that.
