His Number Is Still in My Favorites
Deleting it feels like a second funeral I refuse to attend.
There are four numbers in my phone's favorites: my sister, my best friend, my landlord, and my father, who has been dead for two years and four months. My phone does not know this. Every time I open the list, there he is, second from the top, DAD in capital letters with the little green phone icon beside his name, patiently available, as reachable as anyone.
I know exactly how this looks. My sister deleted his number the week after the funeral, in the same brisk efficient sweep that handled the bank and the subscriptions and the coat donations, and she is fine, or her version of fine, which involves a lot of jogging. When she saw his name still in my favorites last Thanksgiving, over my shoulder while I searched for a photo, she got very quiet and then said, gently, like a nurse, you know you can let that go now.
I changed the subject to pie.
Because here is what I could not explain over turkey: deleting his number is a funeral, a second one, private, held in a menu, officiated by my own thumb. Delete contact. Are you sure? No... I am not sure. I have never once been sure. The first funeral was mandatory. This one is optional, and I decline. I keep declining. Refusing to attend is the only power grief has ever offered me and I take it.
My father was not a phone person, which makes all of this funnier and worse. He was a man who answered calls like the phone had insulted him. Yello, he would say, one syllable of pure suspicion. He typed texts with one enormous index finger, and every message arrived like a telegram from 1930.
GOT THE PART FOR THE SINK STOP.
He never learned that the microphone button existed. He never once used an emoji except a single thumbs up, deployed for all occasions: my promotion, thumbs up. His own cancer scare turning out benign, thumbs up. The birth of my niece, thumbs up. The man communicated in wood, in fixed hinges and planed doors, and the phone was just the noise you endured between visits.
And yet. The number.
For the first year I called it. I am not embarrassed by this anymore; I have learned since that half the grieving world does it, all of us dialing the dead, sitting in parked cars listening to outgoing messages like they are radio broadcasts from a country that no longer exists. His voicemail was seven words: you have reached Frank, leave a message. No warmth, no flourish, a man reading his own name like a parts number. I could have listened to it a thousand times... I think I got to maybe two hundred.
Then, in the spring of the second year, the carrier did what carriers do to an unpaid line. I called on a bad Tuesday, needing my seven words, and got a stranger's voice saying the number was no longer in service. I sat in the car in the grocery store parking lot with the engine off and understood that he had died again, a little, in a server somewhere, and nobody had even sent flowers.
That should have been the moment I deleted the contact. There was nothing behind the number anymore.
It was a door painted on a wall.
I kept it anyway. This is the part I want to try to explain, because when I finally wrote about it and shared the piece with other writers, the messages that came back told me I was not the only one keeping a dead loved one's number like a pressed flower. One woman had paid her mother's phone bill for three years to keep the voicemail alive. A man texted his late wife every Friday, twelve years running. We are everywhere, we keepers, walking around with our haunted favorites lists, and almost none of us talk about it, because it sounds like failure to move on, when really it is something closer to memory insisting on a physical address.
The contact is not a way to reach him. It is proof that reaching him was once so ordinary I had a button for it.
That is the whole secret, honestly. The favorites list is a museum of my priorities, and he earned his place in it across sixty-one years, four of them teaching me to drive stick in a church parking lot with more patience than the transmission deserved. Deleting DAD would make my phone accurate. I have decided I would rather have it true.
But the story does not end in the museum, because grief never lets you curate in peace.
Last October, on his birthday, I did the thing I had been circling for months.
I texted the dead number.
I knew it had been reassigned by then; numbers get recycled after they go dormant, some stranger out there was walking around with my father's ten digits in their pocket. I texted anyway. I wrote: Happy birthday Dad. The sink still works. I miss you every single day. Then I put the phone face down on the counter and made dinner with my heart slamming like I had sent something risky, which I suppose I had. I had sent a letter to a house where someone new lived.
At 9:40 the phone buzzed.
I want you to sit with how that felt for one second. The buzz, the name DAD lighting the screen in the dark kitchen... the pure animal instant before reason arrives.
The message said: I think you have the wrong number. But happy birthday to your dad. He sounds like he was good with sinks. Mine wasn't. Take care of yourself, okay?
A stranger. Some person in the world who received a dead man's mail and, instead of ignoring it, stood in the doorway of that painted-on door and answered kindly.
I sat down on the kitchen floor, which is apparently where all my important moments happen, and I cried in the specific way you cry when the world turns out to be gentler than you had prepared for. I never texted the number again... Some doors you only need answered once. But I think about that person constantly, my father's unwitting heir, wandering around with his digits, being decent with them. He would have sent a thumbs up.
Loneliness, I have learned, is not the absence of people. It is the absence of particular people, unsubstitutable ones, and no crowd can be spent against that debt. The number in my favorites is where my particular person used to stand, and I keep the spot the way towns keep statues, not because anyone confuses bronze for the man, but because the square would be a lie without him. I wrote my way to that understanding slowly, poem by poem, most of them filed under love even when they wore loneliness as a coat, and I do not expect to be finished any time soon.
My sister asked again this spring, kind as ever. You still have it in there? She held out her hand for my phone, offering to be my thumb, to officiate the little funeral for me so I would not have to attend that one either.
I said no thank you. Then I opened the favorites and showed her the list, and she looked at DAD, second from the top, reachable forever, and after a while she handed the phone back and said, quietly, send me that contact.
Now he is in her favorites too. It is not a resurrection. It is a statue in two squares. In this family, that counts as spring.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.