1. SHOCK & DENIAL
2. PAIN & GUILT
3. ANGER & BARGAINING
4. "DEPRESSION", REFLECTION, LONELINESS
5. THE UPWARD TURN
6. RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH
7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE
Somewhere around 3.5, maybe:
3.5. DELETING EMAIL CONTACT
I've experienced this stage before with other deaths of friends and loved ones, but this morning it struck me with new and potent force when I realized my mother's address was still on my email contact and chat lists. I almost chose the option to simply "Hide" her because it felt impossibly painful to delete her. To have to click on "Delete"—erase, cancel, remove from existence—is such a stab in the heart. This person is really and truly gone. I can "hide" from that fact, if I want, but I've never been one to hide from reality. Might as well face it—hiding from it doesn't change what is. And Mom is gone. No more emails, no more internet chats with her.Mom was always frustrating to chat with on the internet because she had an antediluvian dial-up connection that gave her responses a serious time lag effect. It was especially difficult in 3- or 4-way chats with my sisters and Mom, where my sisters and I would already be 3 laps around the conversational track when Mom finally got a comment through. One-on-one chats with her weren't much better: I'd type my comment, send it, then go do something else while waiting for her reply to come back. Conversationus Interruptus.
But however unsatisfying those conversations may have been, they were still contact. Connection, dial-up or otherwise. To actively delete her from my contact list, to face the absolute lack of her in my internet life—in life. period.—split open my heart and brought a gush of new grief to the surface. It is a definite step in the process of grieving. I haven't erased her from my phone directories yet. That comes next. Step 3.75.
2 comments:
I know what you mean by not being able to delete stuff from a person who has passed away.One of my friends at work was let go and before moving on to her next job killed herself. At work I have folders for people in my team and I can't get rid of hers. I still have the email from here where I figured out how the internet quiz "pick how many pieces of chocolate you eat in a week and we will tell you your age" works via Algerbra. She had sent out an email that she would buy a burrito to anyone who could figure out how it worked. My first reaction to her suicide was "but she owes me a burrito." I guess somewhere in my mind I expect to need that email to cash in my winnings in the future. I think email addresses might be like odd quirky heirlooms, stuff you just can't get rid of even though they don't really have an objective value to anyone but you.
Di, I felt very much like this after my father died last year. Deleting his email address, deleting his phone number from my cell, and ultimately deleting the nursing home phone number from my cell were all like extra little deaths. The thing about raw grief is that it comes back again and again, long after we think it "should be over."
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