'Beyond the Language of the Living'

“After someone dies I find it hard to delete their contact from my phone. It feels cruel somehow, as if it was a final obliteration.” 

I didn’t know others felt this way, and dismissed it as my indulgence in sentimentality. Rabbi David Wolpe’s admission comes as reassurance. I tend to be tidy and have little tolerance for an accumulation of clutter but I can’t delete my brother’s contact numbers from my phone, nor those of an old Ohio friend who died in Maryland several years ago. The same goes for my pocket address books. I’ve always kept one, starting with my first newspaper job. The one I still occasionally consult is my third and looks like a beat-up checkbook. Taken together they represent pieces of a fragmented autobiography.

 

Among the dead I find phone numbers and addresses for my high-school creative writing teacher, the novelist William Gaddis, the teacher who taught us Afro-American literature, electrical and mechanical engineers at Rice University, a former landlord, the poet Helen Pinkerton, my late father-in-law and mother-in-law, D.G. Myers, several former newspaper colleagues, my youngest son’s first guitar teacher, and more.

 

Each of the dead is a memento mori and often a goad to happy memories. To be reminded unexpectedly of Helen Pinkerton or David Myers is a bittersweet gift. T.S. Eliot writes in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of The Four Quartets (1943):

 

“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”