The Last Text From Someone Who's Gone

The dead used to leave letters, and then they left answering-machine tapes, and now they leave a text thread, and I think the text thread might be the hardest of all of them to hold, for a reason that took me a while to work out and that I want to try to say plainly, because if you have one you already know the feeling and have probably never had it named.

Somewhere in your phone, if you have lost someone in the last decade or so, there is a conversation that has stopped. It is still there. The name is still at the top, in whatever colour your phone uses for the living, because your phone does not know, and there is no setting for it, and so the dead sit in your contacts exactly as they did, and the thread scrolls up and back through months or years of ordinary exchange — the plans, the jokes, the what time works for you, the photos, the let me know when you land — a whole relationship preserved in a scroll, right there, in your hand, whenever you want it and whenever you can’t stand it. And at the bottom of it, the last one. The final message, from them or from you, and here is the thing that makes it unbearable, the thing that is true of nearly every one of these: it is completely ordinary.

The cruelty of the ordinary last word

Because nobody knows it is the last one. That is the whole of it. The last letter a person writes might, if they are dying, be a considered thing, a farewell, weighted. But the last text is just a text, fired off in the middle of an ordinary life by a person who fully expected to send another one that afternoon. On my way. Ha, exactly. Call you tomorrow. xx. And then they didn’t call you tomorrow, because there was no tomorrow, and the throwaway line became, without anyone’s consent, the final word, permanent, the last thing that will ever pass between you, and it is on my way, and the ordinariness of it is not a small cruelty, it is the whole cruelty, because it is proof — right there in the green bubble — that they had no idea, that they were mid-stride, mid-life, mid-conversation, that they fully intended to keep talking to you and were simply, mid-sentence, stopped.

A grand last word would almost be easier. A goodbye you could hold as a goodbye. But call you tomorrow is not a goodbye, it is the opposite of a goodbye, it is a promise of continuation, and it is the last thing they ever said to you, and every time your eye falls on it you feel the full weight of the interruption, the mid-lifeness of the death, the ten thousand ordinary messages that were supposed to follow this one and never came. The thread does not end. It stops. And a thing that stops is worse than a thing that ends, because ending has a shape and stopping is just the sudden edge of a cliff in the middle of a normal path.

The name you can’t take out

And then there is the specific modern torture that no previous form of the leftover dead ever had, which is that the channel is still open. Technically. Uselessly. Unbearably.

You can still open the thread. You can still type into it. The little box is right there at the bottom, patient, ready, exactly as it was when they were alive, and you could write a message this very minute — you sometimes do, people do, I miss you, the baby has your eyes, I don’t know why I’m typing this — and you could even press send, and it would go, into whatever void a message goes into when the number is disconnected or the phone is in a drawer at their mother’s house, and it would not be received, and it would not be answered, and the not-being-answered is the entire grief distilled into a user interface: a conversation you can still add to and never continue, a person you can still write to and never reach, a green box waiting, forever, for a reply from someone who will not send one. The answering machine at least told you leave a message and then beeped and moved on. The text thread just sits there, open, ready, implying, with its patient little box, that you could still say something, that the line is still up, that the person might still — and they won’t, and you know they won’t, and you type it anyway, sometimes, at two in the morning, because the box lets you, because deleting the whole thread is unthinkable, a second death you will not administer, and so it stays, the name in the wrong colour, the last ordinary line, the box still waiting.

Why we keep it open

I am not going to tell you to delete it, or to keep it, because there is no right answer and the people who need to keep the thread and the people who cannot bear to see it are both simply grieving, in the way their particular grief requires, and I have no standing to sort them. I will just name the thing, because naming it is the only comfort I have to offer, and sometimes it is enough to know the shape of what you are carrying.

What you are carrying is a conversation that stopped mid-word, with a person who did not know it was stopping, preserved perfectly in your hand, still technically open, ending on an ordinary line that was never meant to be an ending, addressed to a name your phone still lists among the living because there is no way to tell it otherwise. You scroll it, sometimes, the whole thread, the whole relationship in green and grey, and you get to the bottom, to the call you tomorrow, and you sit with the fact that tomorrow is where they stopped, and the little box waits at the bottom of it, patient and useless and unbearable, offering to let you say the next thing, the next thing, the next thing that will never come — and you close the phone, and you don’t delete it, and you never will, because as long as the thread is there the conversation has only stopped, and to delete it would be to admit that it has, finally and actually, ended, and you are not ready, and you may never be, to press that.