The Recurring Event

It shows up on next month the way it showed up on this one, and on the month after that, and on every month you care to scroll to, out past the edge of anything you can plan for — a small block on the shared family calendar, in the colour that means them, repeating. Dad — physio, Tuesdays, 2pm. Mom’s book club. Call the kids, Sundays. Anniversary. They set it, once, years ago, and when the little menu asked how often and until when, they chose weekly, or yearly, and for the end date they chose the thing everyone chooses, the default, the one that isn’t really a choice at all: never. Repeat forever. No end date. Because why would there be one. Who, setting up their own standing appointments, pauses to specify the week their own life will stop. So the event was told to recur until the end of time, and the calendar, which does exactly what it is told, has been faithfully generating it ever since, and goes on generating it now, week after week, into a future the person is no longer in.

There is something about it that is worse than the other traces, and it took me a while to place why, and it is this: the recurring event is not one artifact. It is infinite. The photograph is a single thing; the last text is a single thing; you can hold them, grieve them, set them down. But the recurring event has no bottom. Scroll forward — next month, it’s there; next year, there; five years on, still there, physio Tuesday 2pm in a year the person will have been dead half a decade — and it keeps going, off past the horizon, a life’s small standing obligations projected out to eternity by a machine that was told to repeat and never told to stop. The dead person’s Tuesdays go on forever in the calendar, all of them, every single one that will ever exist, already scheduled, already waiting, an unbroken column of appointments for a body that will not be attending any of them.

The tense the calendar lives in

What makes it hurt in its own particular way is the tense. Everything else the dead leave is in the past tense — records, images, messages, the closed archive of what was. The calendar is the one thing that speaks entirely in the future. It does not remember; it plans. Its whole grammar is forward — will, shall, next, upcoming, at 2pm on Tuesday you will — and so the recurring event is the past reaching into the future and confidently booking it, a dead person’s intentions still filling up the weeks ahead, still claiming time that hasn’t happened yet, still saying I will be at physio in a voice that has no idea it is wrong. The tabs left open pointed at the immediate future, next week, the recipe, the cart. The recurring event points at all the future, indefinitely, and keeps pointing, and will keep pointing until someone stops it, and stopping it is the thing nobody wants to do.

The button that ends the forever

Because there is a button, of course there is, and it is worse than most of the buttons, because of what it makes you choose. You open the event — some ordinary evening, tidying the calendar, or bracing for it on purpose — and you go to delete it, and the calendar, being helpful, being careful, asks you the question it always asks about anything that repeats: This is a recurring event. Do you want to delete only this event, or this and all following events? And there it is, the choice nobody should have to make with their own thumb, phrased in the flat language of software: this and all following events. All future events. Every Tuesday from now until the end of time, in one tap. The calendar is asking you to confirm that the forever they set is over — to reach into the infinite forward column of their standing appointments and cancel the whole of it, all at once, every physio, every Sunday call, every anniversary yet to come, gone in a single administrative stroke.

And it is such a small motion, and it is enormous, because it is the calendar’s version of the burial — the moment you tell the machine, on the record, that there will be no more Tuesdays, that the recurrence ends here, that the life which was booked to repeat until the end of time has in fact stopped and you are the one confirming it. People sit with their thumb over delete all following events for a long time. Some can’t, and leave it, and let the block go on appearing on every future month in the colour that means them, a standing appointment nobody keeps, because deleting the forever feels like ending it a second time. And some do it, quickly, because seeing physio Tuesday 2pm surface every single week is its own slow injury and they need it to stop. And both are right, because there is no correct way to cancel infinity on behalf of someone you loved.

I am not going to tell you which to press. I only want to name the strange thing the calendar does, that none of the other artifacts do — that it made the dead, without their knowing, plan for a future without limit, book every week to come, set their small ordinary life to repeat forever because forever was the easy default and none of us reads that box as the promise it is. And now the forever is running, faithfully, in the calendar, throwing their Tuesdays out past every horizon — and it falls to someone left behind to open the event, and read the flat little question, and decide whether to let the appointments go on standing in a future no one will attend, or to reach out and end the recurrence with a thumb, and tell the machine the truth it will otherwise never learn: that there is an end date after all, that it was not never, that it was already, and that the last Tuesday has been kept.