I spent an hour Wednesday counting the dead people on my computer contact list.
There are 18, at least, that I know of. And as a matter of policy, I keep their contact info indefinitely.
They include Hiawatha Davis, a Denver councilman who lost his life nine years ago; Annette Caramia Moller, my former editor in Las Vegas; and Dr. Stanley Biber, the sex-change surgeon in Trinidad whom I’ll always regret not having interviewed.
Like most everyone, I keep phone numbers and e-mail addresses in an online “contacts” list that I try to edit when people move or switch jobs.
But when they die, I don’t update. It’s a policy rooted in sentimentalism, as if saving their contact information somehow keeps them within reach.
Turns out lots of folks have lots of notions about mortality and the Internet.
Denver policy consultant Andrew Wallach has a longer-than-average list of contacts and a superstitious aversion to erasing any of them.
“The act of taking someone off your Outlook makes death real and eerily final. I don’t want to be responsible for wiping anybody out of cyberspace,” he said.
Beverly Teller, a septuagenarian I met while she was addressing a sympathy note at Starbucks, says she, too, keeps contact info on the dead.
“I like to see their names on my list,” she said.
When I grew up, we ate Chinese most Sundays with my grandmother. Almost every week, she’d fill us in over subgum chicken chow mein about the latest funeral she attended. By her 90s, she had checked off her list almost everyone she knew in her generation.
She became somewhat of an expert on obsolescence.
My grandma never used the Internet, but I think of her sometimes when scanning the online “legacy books” on which e-mailers write about — and to — people they’ve lost. They make for great reading.
“Hey Bubba, miss you so so bad,” reads one very sweet message written to a Colorado man who had been dead for three days.
“Don’t forget to take care of yourself wherever you are, Dad,” reads a note to a well-loved father who, wherever he really is, probably isn’t checking his e-mail.
In May, a faculty member at the University of Denver sent her colleague, law professor Erik Bluemel, a message asking to be her “friend” on Facebook. He died in a biking accident a few days later. She’s haunted by the fact that he never responded to what she knows was a fairly rote overture.
“It seems so sad and unfinished,” she tells me.
For all its coldness and lack of intimacy, there’s something comforting about a technology that makes your name pop up once in a while, even posthumously. And there’s something reassuring about a place, if only virtual, where people still write to you after you’re long gone.
We spend so much time in front of glowing rectangles that we want the people we’ve lost to be in them somehow.
Every few weeks, I remember the late Hiawatha Davis, who was my favorite council member. His memory is safe in my Outlook between contacts named Alex Davis and Mick Davis, whoever they are. Had the tables been turned, I’d find it depressing — you know, existentially — if Hiawatha had removed me from his own list of contacts.
I’m writing this column because I’ve just lost a dear friend. He took his own life last week.
I’m angry with him. And I’m trying hard not to press delete.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
