his tomorrow will not come
live for today , yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come …..
taken verbatim (typos and all) from dad’s mood message on skype. originally, the day after he died i promptly removed michael schuetz from my contacts list. i don’t recall much hesitation on my part because, truthfully, i had been preparing for this day. inevitably, the time would come when chatting with him would be an impossibility, and his name glaring at me would only serve as a painful reminder that our conversations had reached their end. his random “knock knock, you there?” messages would no longer pop up. our digital exchanges had run their course. his tomorrow would not come. so it seemed only natural that i’d want to hit the delete button on his name.
but i didn’t keep his name off my list for too long. despite my normally overanalytical nature, i was too hasty with my purge. i remembered that i hadn’t exported the log from our conversations, so i added him back to my list for that sole purpose. being a selective sentimental fool, i tend to keep the communications of the electronic variety. cards and other snail mail don’t stick around our house too long simply for the clutter factor. but emails and chat logs? i’ll probably keep those tokens forever. what’s a little hard drive space being consumed by blathering messages? (i have a hard time deleting text messages as well.)
after my struggle with removing his name from skype, i accepted the fact that i needed to clean house. his cell phone number was changed to have mom’s name for the time being. i stopped following his twitter profile. his status as a secondary beneficiary on my financial documents is being amended. his name may be gone, but he certainly is not forgotten.
mom had the bigger task. life insurance. health insurance. car insurance. student loans. bank accounts. pension. social security. IRA. mortgage. utilities. and the answering machine. of all the errands we ran the day after dad’s cremation service, of all the to-dos that popped up on our list, the one item that stung the most was mom changing the outgoing message on the damn answering machine. it reminded me of father’s day, the night his body was removed from our living room. mom started continued crying.
“that’s the last time he’ll leave this house…”
the answering machine, such a seemingly sterile household appliance. but its small, unassuming footprint on the side table is deceptive. a constant reminder that no one will leave a message for dad any longer. and if they do, he or she will clearly be a telemarketer or some other poor soul who hadn’t received the news. sorry, there’s no one here by that name any longer.
but we will never forget.