Voice Messages from the Dead

      Technology is wonderful. It helps keep us alive. It also helps keep the idea of us alive after we’re dead.  

      My voice mailbox now includes four messages from people who are no longer living. Some of them, in fact, have been dead for some time. I haven’t erased the messages although they fill up space in the mailbox and there is no practical purpose for them to still be there.

      But I still don’t want to get rid of them, erase them from my machine, delete them from my life, and I know I am not alone in doing this. Or not doing this.

      In past eras, we would hold onto old photographs or letters or meaningful mementoes of those no longer with us. In our tech era, I’ve read about people even finding ways to keep a loved one’s voicemail greeting, usually a parent or close relative who had died.

      This is now so common, there’s even a new service that can do it for you automatically, saving a loved one’s voicemail greeting as an MP3 file you can keep. Purchasers of the service could listen to the recording again and again, hearing a voice they had known all their lives, preserved in technological amber. 

      My messages from the dead aren’t from loved ones. All four of the people are friends who have passed away during the last decade or so. The voicemails are mundane, normal messages you’d expect to get from friends:

Can we get together for lunch next Tuesday?

Just calling to say hi.

I can’t meet you for coffee next week; how about the week after?

Hey, give me a call when you get a chance.

      They were messages left without the awareness that they would be the last messages, sometimes the last contact at all, that I would have with these people.  They were messages left when people already had serious health problems or when they had no idea at all that they would be gone reasonably soon.

      I haven’t actually listened again to any of the messages. I think, somehow, weirdly, if I listen to them it will remind me, once more, that my friends are gone, that I will never get another message from them and that we will never meet for lunch again on Tuesday. 

      I do, however, like to scroll through the mailbox occasionally so I can see their names there, imagine getting together with Bruce for another lunch, or calling Peter back and asking how the medical appointments are going or telling Clay that our favorite Japanese restaurant has closed.

      The conversation, I like to think, continues.