A very close IRL friend with whom I also had an active, ongoing email correspondence with for about six years died just before Christmas 2010. After a 14-month-long fight with cancer.
I still have her gmail folder with our hundreds and hundreds of online exchages, and her name is still on the “frequently contacted” contacts that comes up on the front page of my main gmail account. It makes me sad seeing her name there, and I keep thinking I “should” delete at least her name from my contacts. (As I said in the hoarding thread, I’m definitely not a hoarder and it makes me very uneasy to keep stuff around that I don’t want or need; this extends to email addresses and saved phone numbers, like that.) I’m not a particularly sentimental person.
But the idea of clicking OK in response to “are you sure you want to delete Margot?” feels…cold? Unfeeling? Somehow awful. I’m not coming up with the right word.
What would you, or have you done, in similar circumstances?
I don’t think it’s at all weird that you don’t want to delete her. I just checked my old e-mail folder and, yes, I have e-mails from my brother, who died in 2010. I can’t delete them. I think I finally did delete him from my contacts because my e-mail program auto-completes addresses and it was jarring to have his name continually popping up whenever I went to enter an address that began with the letter T.
A book buddy died last year, very young. If I’d had any inkling that she’d be gone so soon, before me, I would have kept all of her messages. She was a real sweetheart, and always had interesting stuff to say about whatever she was reading. And so snarky.
This is rather off-topic, but there is nothing quite so unsettling as when your widowed Facebook friend changes their user pic to a pic of their deceased spouse. There you are, scrolling through your feed when BOOM! Your dead friend, smiling right at you.
Back on topic, I’d leave her name there. I know it makes you feel sad, but that feeling is completely part of the grieving process anyway.
If I had a very close IRL friend who died a couple of years ago, I’d probably be reluctant to delete any aspect of my correspondence with them, and that would include their presence in any list.
I don’t know, I take the opposite view. It’s one thing to save all your old letters, which you should certainly do, but crossing a person’s name out of the address book, as it were, is part of the grieving process. At least, it’s part of mine.
Not really relevant story: I have a family member that died under fairly tragic circumstances almost a decade ago. His wife and he shared an email address under his name, and forwhatever reason, she’s kept using that address. It always kinda weirds me out when I see his name on a new email in my inbox, especially as I only exchange emails with his wife once or twice a year, and so it usually takes me a few seconds to remember who its really from.
I still keep the e-mail account of my late father active. He subscribed to a number of newsletters which still keep coming. He liked them and sometimes printed them out and showed them to me. Somehow, I’d like to pretend Dad is still around.
I would delete at least their name from my contacts and not feel guilty in the slightest. They are dead. Is it helping me to look at their names every day? No? Is it hindering my healing? Then delete it, and do whatever else I need to do to move on.
That doesn’t mean you should do the same. Everyone grieves differently.
For me, it is a bit of a hurdle to delete the names of the dead from my lists, but as some point I feel like I must. It’s far worse, and harder to do anything about it, when my dead friends on LinkedIn keep popping up.
In my amazon account I have an address of a friend of mine who committed suicide. I order stuff from Amazon fairly frequently and I see his name/address there. Until this thread the notion of deleting it didn’t even register, which I think is kind of weird.
If it’s comforting you, leave it in, would be my advice. If something is stopping you, then you aren’t ready yet. I get tired of this modern “move on” mentality. I’m sure half the agression and depression and other mental illnesses around these days (and they are on the increase) are due to people being told and counselled to “move on” and feeling, like you, that they “should” when they aren’t in fact ready to move on and need to do some more grieving or dealing with stuff before they can do so. Nobody dares to tell a person to stop visiting and tending a gravestone and leaving flowers, tidying it and planting bulbs for spring etc etc yet the deceased is no longer there, their spirit has flown Lord knows where and their bones/cremated remains beneath are just dust or unrecognisable. It’s no different. If seeing your friend’s name help keeps them alive in your memory then in some sense she is with you every day and that can be nice. It’s your choice entirely, there is no “should” about it.
Funny this should come up. My buddy was killed two and a half years ago. Two days ago I got a new phone and this is the first time I didn’t transfer his number over to my new one. I think it is because I manually entered the number in and I couldn’t do it. The last few times all my contacts were automatically imported.
But yeah, I still save his old emails. I’ll probably never get rid of those.
