Yesterday, while on extended hold with an appliance store, I deleted dead people from my Contacts. First to go, my mom’s friend Peggy (d. 2011), who once found a tropical frog in a plant she’d bought, then kept it alive for two years in her Philadelphia apartment. To learn its diet, Peggy called the local zoo. Neighbors later reported an infestation of crickets in the building’s tenth-floor hallway.
I kept a handful of famous names as mementos of my journalism days but ousted the prominent Manhattan editor (d. 2019) who told me to “make shit up” when I worked as a ghost writer. I was fired after a first draft. The “memoir” won a big award.
I removed the young tenant from my rental house (d. 2013) who had killed himself, as well as his sister, the parents’ intermediary. They paid rent for another few months, slowly emptying the house, emptying the basement bursting with musical instruments, dismantling the upstairs compound of what struck me as an older man’s life: furniture suites and spice racks, security cameras and custom sconces.
Still on hold. With so many of us pandemically housebound, home improvement items like the clothes dryer I need are in high demand, along with fire pits and treadmills and jigsaw puzzles and make-your-own kits. To give up on my call would be foolish, I figured, as I deleted Terry (d. 2010), a lovely man who crafted low-alcohol artisanal ciders in Western Massachusetts. Terry had a great head of gray hair and a graceful air about him, and he died in a cider-making accident (explosion), but he already may have been in the grip of terminal cancer. My husband ran across his widow recently; she runs the cider business along with their son, who has found equilibrium now that he’s stopped drinking.
The day before my call, ordering the dryer had been a snap. Add to cart. Checkout. Finish and Pay. But I realized afterward I need installation, too, and this could only be arranged by phone. One person after another asked me to hold just a moment while they got me to the right department, and meanwhile I removed the restaurant owner from my dad’s hometown (d. 2009), who was found in the woods in his pickup, self-inflicted gunshot, after the health department presented an untenable ultimatum. There may also have been a broken heart.
I doubt I’d ever used the listing for Dorothy (d. 2010), the mother of a friend I’ve since lost touch with. Dorothy had an elegant accent, vaguely Westport and vaguely House of Windsor, but which her daughter believed had been picked up on the train that took Dorothy from a scrappy Chicago childhood to an adult life of New York’s arts and letters.
When my shoulder cramped from propping up the phone, I laid it down and activated the speaker. Tuneless music unfurled across my desk as I discovered I still had a number for Murty (d. 2006), the roofer from across the street. Murty died young, or youngish, in his late forties. Wrapped himself around a tree, someone said, driving drunk. “Died suddenly,” the obituary said. When I once hired his company to fix my porch, Murty promised he wouldn’t send the knucklehead who wore short shorts to work. “Hot pants,” Murty called them.
I erased Jo (d. 2003), my mother’s favorite travel buddy from the days when Mom—now ninety-six and socially distancing in her retirement community—went hither and yon on a teacher’s pension. My sisters and I threaten to get Mom a three-wheeled bike, but where would she ride it, she asks us? And who’s left to go with her?
Yes, I said to the employee who finally picked up, I could wait ten minutes while he finished with another customer. What was ten minutes, I joked, after an hour and a half? His non-response suggested that perhaps my bitterness had seeped through. By the time he returned, I’d made it through the alphabet. I’d kept Julie (d. 2004), the mother of my childhood best friend and a second mom to me, and my neighbor Deena (d. 2020), whose pancreatic cancer came on so fast she was in hospice before I heard she was ill. I kept my father (d. August 16, 2006). Setting up installation took all of five minutes, but then the appliance department employee said he couldn’t take payment and would have to connect me to customer service. Yes, I said. I’ll hold.
Lise Funderburg is the author of the memoir Pig Candy and the editor of Apple Tree: Writers on Their Parents. She teaches at the Paris Writers Workshop and the University of Pennsylvania.
