Every Monday I get a message on my mobile telephone pointing out just how much of my life I have wasted messing around with the bloody thing. It goes something like this: ‘Last week you spent 23 hours and 59 minutes every single day on your phone. This is one minute a day less than the week before.’ Something like that. I have no reason to doubt its accuracy, either, because my phone is surgically attached to me, performing every major function in my life, or so it seems. Scrolling through page after page the other day, I found something that genuinely upset me. I have retained messages, emails and texts from an alarmingly large number of folk who have died.
At first, I found it a little spooky. How could this be? How come these different forms of communication hadn’t died with them? Of course, it was no different from, say, than an old photograph or even a cassette tape featuring someone who was no longer with us. I do not believe in some afterlife, that we will somehow survive our own deaths and live forever, so to find all these words from people who are no longer here was strangely comforting in some ways and upsetting in others.
I shall not go into specifics here because frankly it would be in very poor taste to do so. People die in all sorts of ways and in some cases it would not be hard for the loved-ones of the deceased to work out just who I was writing about. And these messages were all very personal, for my eyes only if you will, and despite the senders no longer being with us, I intend to maintain their confidence(s).
Most of the messages are from people who knew that their time was coming and it was coming early. Others passed unexpectedly and I found myself left with unfinished conversations. In every single case, there were things that remained unsaid which I wish hadn’t been. Some things got in the way, sometimes things like Covid, some like geography in one form or another and more frequently time ran out.
Regrets? I’ve had a few. Guilt? I’ve had some of that, too, but folk reassuringly said you have nothing to be guilty of. The fact that I am still shoe-horning song lyrics into my thoughts shows that I’ve come to terms with things, that I did all I could. The messages seem to suggest those who went on to die felt the same way. I hope so.
The words are not from beyond the grave because people don’t talk from beyond the grave. They were from conversations we had via the new technology of cyberspace and like an old photo and a cassette tape, I can keep them forever.
I have thought about deleting my conversations with the deceased. What, I wondered, was the point? They were final conversations, even though the sender wasn’t to know that.
Messages from the more recently departed are harder to read than the older ones. The older ones are from people whose deaths I have finished mourning, taking me to a time when I can celebrate their lives and laugh about some of the stories. In short, time is a healer. I was right to keep their messages and that’s why I shall retain the more recent ones.
The messages are my photo albums, letters and postcards. They are every bit as precious as the written versions of friends and family I keep in boxes in the loft and they’re far easier to retrieve. It’s good to look back from time-to-time to remind ourselves who we have have lost and now miss. Today we just do things a bit differently so when you see me fiddling on my phone every second of the day, you never know, I might be thinking of an old family member or friend by reading their messages again and keeping their memory alive.
I doubt that I could live my life satisfactorily without my mobile phone. With memories such as these, I am not sure I’d want to try.
