The Last Video Call

For a great many people now, the last time they saw someone alive was on a screen. Not in a room, not across a table, but on a video call — a face in a lit rectangle, slightly out of sync, a little pixelated when the connection dipped, framed too close the way these calls always frame us. And it was, most likely, an entirely ordinary call. You talked about nothing much. You showed them something, or they showed you the garden, or a grandchild wandered into frame. And at the end you did what everyone does at the end of these calls: you said okay, I’ll let you go, and talk soon, and love you, bye, and maybe you both did the little wave people do at screens, and then one of you tapped the red button and the rectangle collapsed and the face was gone. And that was the last time. You just didn’t know it was.

The video call is its own kind of last, distinct from all the recorded things, and the distinction is the whole ache of it: it was live. It was not a photograph, not a saved clip, not a home movie of them years ago. It was them, in real time, moving and talking and looking back at you — and looking back is the thing, because a video call is mutual, it is the one screen where the dead person was also seeing you, in that same moment, your face in their rectangle as theirs was in yours, the two of you actually together across the distance, both present, both there. The last video call was the last time you and they occupied the same moment. The last time their face responded to yours in real time. The last time they saw you see them. And it ended with a red button and a casual goodbye, because you had every reason to believe there would be another call on Sunday, the way there always was.

The casualness is the faith

What haunts people about the last call is almost never the content — it is the casualness of the goodbye, the offhand ordinary sign-off, the okay love you bye tossed off on the way to hanging up. Because in hindsight it feels like it should have been more. It feels like the last time you ever saw someone’s living face should have carried some weight, some ceremony, some proper farewell — and instead it was talk soon, it was a wave, it was the same three seconds of hang-up you’d done a thousand times, and you want to reach back into that rectangle and say the real things, the whole things, and you can’t, because it is over, and it ended on nothing, on the small change of a normal goodbye.

And here is the thing I would want you to hear, if you are carrying a last call that ended too lightly: the casualness was not a failure. The casualness was faith. The reason you said talk soon and meant it, the reason you didn’t say everything, the reason you hung up easily and went back to your evening — is that you believed, completely and correctly-until-you-weren’t, that there would be more. The offhand goodbye is what love sounds like when it assumes a future. We save the big farewells for when we know, and we almost never know, and so the last words are nearly always ordinary, because ordinary is what you say to someone you expect to see again. That you didn’t make a ceremony of it is not evidence that you loved them lightly. It is evidence that you loved them like someone who was sure they’d be back on Sunday — which is the most trusting way there is to love anyone, and the way it is supposed to be, right up until the call that turns out to be the last.

The face you can’t quite hold

There is a cruelty specific to the video call that the other lasts don’t have, and it is this: usually there is no recording. The photograph you keep; the voicemail you keep; but the video call happened live and vanished, most of the time, unrecorded, because who records an ordinary Sunday call — and so the last time you saw their face move, the last time it looked back at you, exists nowhere but in your memory, already blurring, the exact expression on it that day fading the way the sound of a voice fades, until you can no longer quite summon how they looked in that final rectangle, what they were wearing, whether the connection was good, what the last thing was that made them laugh. The most present, most mutual, most live of all the last encounters leaves the least behind, because its whole nature was to be happening now, and now is the one thing that cannot be saved.

And so people do a strange thing, which is that they hold onto the fact of the call even without the footage — they remember that it happened, they can tell you it was a Sunday, that a grandchild wandered in, that the goodbye was ordinary — and they return to it, this last live moment, precisely because it was the last time it was mutual, the last time the seeing went both ways. Everything after is one-directional: you look at their photographs, but the photographs don’t look back; you play their voice, but the voice doesn’t hear you. The last video call was the final instant of the thing that makes a relationship a relationship, which is that you were both there, both present, both seeing and being seen — and it ended, as it had to, as they all do, on okay, love you, bye, and a small wave at a screen, and a red button, and the ordinary faith, entirely reasonable and entirely wrong, that the rectangle would light up again next Sunday with their face in it, looking back.