A little over a week ago, a dear friend died. This man meant the world to me and I was privileged to be with him until the end and even held his hand as he drew his last breath.
I’ve saved all of our emails (over 5,000 in the last 10 years) on my computer. We have also carried on a long, ongoing text conversation. I’m researching how to save and archive those messages, and that’s not my question. In this thread anyway.
The question: I’m wondering how others have handled the issue of moving contact info and messages to a new cell phone when the person has died. Maybe it was a while before you needed a new phone and you just left everything alone. But at some point… Especially if you were paying for two lines. It took me about two years before I could bring myself to cancel my late husband’s line, even though it meant paying for a line I never used.
My mother died in March, and she’s still in my contacts. My uncle died three years ago, and I changed his contact name to his partner, but left the number. When i get a new phone, I’ll move my uncle’s partner over, but not my mother.
Then there’s this issue of ringtones and message notifiers. My friend’s message notifier was-- to me-- his voice, and I’m sure I will never assign that notifier or his email tune to anyone else.
ThelmaLou, I don’t know the answer to your question, but I’m sure someone will be along soon with a solution. My only guess would be do you live near a store that carries the type of phone you have? They may have an idea. I just wanted to say I’m very sorry for the loss of your friend.
Contacts are typically moved over en masse. No need to think about moving/not moving anyone in particular. You’d probably only think about the contact for “Mom” when you want to call “Monica” or “Monique” or someone with a name alphabetically close to hers in your contact list. Unless you have lots of names you’ll never talk to again (including former cow-orkers from a job 10 years ago) clogging up your contact list it’s really not an issue as a given contact is not a lot of storage space.
Texts are associated w/ a device. There are programs that will either copy them over to a new device or archive them (to your computer) if you want to save them.
I have a couple of deceased people in my contact list. It’s more effort to delete them than to leave them there (a whopping 5 sec to go <Edit> - <Delete> vs. 0 sec to leave them there) & gives me a reason to remember them when I scroll past their name.
Sorry, I did not make my question clear. I’m not asking about the techie aspects, but the emotional aspects of to move or not to move.
When a lot of your interaction with the person has been on THIS phone, it can be very sad to decide not to move that big long text convo to a new phone. It’s like taking their picture out of your wallet.
I’m sorry about your friend. I understand perfectly. In my volunteer work, sometimes I deal with less-than-honest people, and my phone – *that *phone – got stolen. And later returned. Honestly, I was more PO’d at myself than anyone else. In the meantime I had to get a new phone, and when the old one was returned I just retired it. It lives in my desk drawer and sometimes I’ll use to to play music, but mostly it’s a memorial.
And if some days I want to carry two phones, :shrug: who’s to know.
My father died 3 years ago. He was on my cellphone plan, and I couldn’t handle cancelling that line for about 6 months. He’s still on my contacts list. His birthday shows up on my phone calendar, and I’m ok with that. It’s an occasional nudge to think of my dad, kind of like running across a photo of him.
I’d add Facebook contacts to that same list. I have several deceased family members still on my Facebook friends list. They show up every once in a while, for one reason or another. I pause, think about them, grieve a bit, smile at a happy memory, and go on with my day.
