The Auto-Reply Still Answers

You send the email for an ordinary reason — a document you need, a loose end, some administrative thread that has to be closed after a death — and it goes to their address, because their address is where the thing lives, and a second later the reply comes back, instantly, the way only a machine replies, and it is them. Or it is written as them, in their name, in the first person: Thanks for your message. I’m currently away from my desk and will get back to you as soon as I can. And you sit there looking at it, this cheerful little automated promise, made in the voice of someone who is dead, assuring you — you specifically, right now — that they will get back to you as soon as they can. And they will not. And the machine does not know that, and has just told you otherwise, in their own words, which they wrote, once, expecting to return.

The auto-reply is different from the other things the dead leave, and the difference is the whole of its strange power: it speaks. Everything else is silent. The frozen profile just sits there; the photographs hold still; the calendar merely schedules. But the out-of-office talks back, in the first person, in the present tense, and it makes a promise about the future — I will reply, I will return, I will get back to you — and it makes that promise in the person’s own name, with their own composed words, to whoever writes, forever, or until someone shuts it off. It is the closest any of the traces comes to the dead actually addressing you, and it is doing it with a sentence they typed on some ordinary afternoon before a trip or a long weekend, never dreaming it would outlive them and go on answering their mail from the far side of their own death.

The promise that can’t be kept

What gives it its particular ache is that it is a promise, and the specific promise it makes is the one that cannot, now, be true. I’ll get back to you. Every out-of-office ever written is a small vow — I have not vanished, I am only away, I am coming back, hold on and I will return to you. That is the entire genre: reassurance about a return. And so the dead person’s auto-reply keeps making, tirelessly, to everyone who writes, the one promise the whole world has just learned they cannot keep — I am only away, I will be back, I will get back to you as soon as I can — a vow of return issued in their name, over and over, into every new message, by a machine that has no idea the return it keeps promising is the one thing that will never come.

And there is a version of it that is almost too much, which is when the message says where they’ve gone. Some auto-replies are specific — I’m out of the office until Monday, I’m on leave and will respond after the 14th, a date that has long since passed, a Monday from months ago, so that the machine promises a return on a day that already came and went without them. Or the crueller accidental poetry of the vaguer ones — I am away and will reply when I return — which, read on the wrong evening, stops being office boilerplate and becomes something almost unbearable, a plain true sentence about exactly where they are: away, and going to reply when they return, and not returning.

Why you write to it anyway

Here is the part I did not expect, and it is the truest thing about the auto-reply, and I have caught myself doing it and I suspect I am not alone: people email the dead to make the machine answer.

Not for the document. Not for any reason. On a bad night, someone sits down and writes an email to the address of a person who is gone — says something, or nothing, or everything they didn’t get to say — and sends it, knowing full well where it goes, which is nowhere, which is an inbox no one will ever open. And the auto-reply comes back, instantly, in their name: Thanks for your message. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. And that is the point. That is why the email got sent. Because it is the one address in the world that still answers, still writes back in their voice, still makes the old promise — and for the length of one automated sentence, some small starving part of you gets to pretend that you wrote to them and they replied, that they are only away, that they will get back to you as soon as they can. You know it is a machine. You know exactly what it is. You send the email anyway, and read the reply anyway, because a promise of return in their name, even a hollow automated one, is more than the silence everywhere else, and you will take it.

And so, for a long time, nobody turns it off. Someone could — there is a login, a setting, a toggle that would silence the out-of-office and let the address go finally quiet. But to switch it off is to end the last thing that still answers in their voice, to take away the one place that still promises they’ll be back, to make the inbox as silent as everything else — and people leave it running instead, for months, for years, this small tireless machine going on making a dead person’s promise to everyone who writes, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, faithfully, into every new message, keeping a vow it cannot keep, on behalf of someone who meant it, once, on an ordinary afternoon, when they still expected to return.