Andrew Cohen.
There I was, working the margin of my Contacts app, trying to click on a tiny letter with a big thumb, getting the wrong letter and, with a sigh, having to scroll. I passed people I haven’t seen in ages, names attached to people I barely know, not only soccer teammates from before the pandemic, but softball teammates from before I became a father — and that was 26 years ago. Some lazy Sunday, I thought, I really must weed out some of these names that will never pop up on my phone’s screen again. And there Tim was.
Tim died suddenly a little over two years ago, a massive heart attack. His wife found him an hour later — he’d gone inside from a dog walk to start cooking their anniversary dinner. I learned what had happened the next day, from Mike, Tim’s brother-in-law. As soon as I saw Mike’s name and number pop up on my screen, I knew that whatever had happened wasn’t good. I have friends who will call just to talk, but Mike isn’t one of them.
These days, seeing Tim’s name among my contacts elicits a strong sense of his absence from my world, a pang, if you will. And yet there’s some comfort in seeing him there. Still there! When I see the name of someone I speak to with some regularity, I might think that it’s been too long, I must call to catch up, or send a random text, just to say hello. When I see Tim’s name, I mourn him for a moment, then I recall him, even if I can’t call him.
There’s just an absurd number of contacts in there. And there shouldn’t be. It would be easier to use if it were more aligned with reality: I don’t know that many people. I just scrolled my entire list, which is very long and not even 10% active. And buried there among the living — the former co-workers, the ex-girlfriends, the kids’ grade-school-friends’ moms, the single names of people whose last names I never learned — are several others who, like Tim, are gone. My stepmother, for one, whose old land line was so old that she would sing the exchange — “Susquehanna seven!” — the way folks used to do. She was 94 when a final stroke felled her. There’s Andy, the softball team manager, older than me by 10 years, and now four years younger (cancer). There’s Patty, my ex’s mom, who died a year ago, during our breakup. There’s Renee, a soccer teammate, missing for almost three years and presumed dead, at 36.
Some time after Margot, my stepmother, passed, I thought about removing her from my contacts. I couldn’t — and I doubt I’m alone in my hesitation to be the hatchet man. Deleting can’t possibly meet the threshold for killing, but maybe there’s a near synonym. Negation? Desecration? She’d still be in my memory after I removed her from my phone, so I don’t know what the big deal would be. But the act of removing her seemed perverse. Flat-out wrong, like pulling a gravestone down.
I also own a pre-cellular address book, with names, addresses and numbers written in pencil, that I haven’t picked up in years. Removing the departed from there would involve erasure — the key word, I think. The past can’t be erased. Things that happened, happened. Friends and acquaintances I made, girlfriends I was involved with, colleagues I worked with, they were all in my life as well as in my contacts. Some were more deeply embedded than others. For almost 50 years before he died, Tim was one of my best friends. Since then, he appears occasionally in my dreams. And, still, in my contacts.
Long after her mother died, Margot told me she saw her in her bedroom late one night, standing next to the vanity. I didn’t scoff, exactly, but I was full of questions like, had my stepmom eaten a heavy meal that evening? Drunk a bit more than usual? She fixed me with a wavering, surly look (she was on her second pre-dinner martini) and told me flatly to open my mind.
Just that evening, she said, she had been thinking about her mother and pulled out a Polaroid of her from an album. She had left it sitting out, on the corner of her vanity. “Well, that explains it!” I said, eliciting another wavering, surly look. “You’ve been thinking about her, so maybe you were having a waking dream about her standing there.” No, she said. She was there.
I knew Tim well — I met him when we were both 14 — and so he knew Margot. He was a skeptical person, like me. He would have had the same doubts, and asked the same questions. It’s possible that I told him about my conversation with Margot, and that he did have the same doubts and questions about her mom’s visitation. Now I can’t drop him a quick text or call him to ask whether or not I did. Why have him in my contacts at all?
Tim will forever be no older than 62. I’m 64, and getting older. Where my contacts list is concerned, it’s now or never — and I’m leaning never. If I can’t manage what should be a simple task when the list of the living far outnumbers the dead, what makes me think I’ll ever be able to grapple with a phone filled with ghosts? What makes me think I can ever hit delete?
Andrew Cohen, formerly Isthmus’ “Out of Bounds” columnist, is currently juggling two book manuscripts.
