Minor Rituals of Death

Before moving to Portland, Maine last June, I had lived in my apartment in Greenwich Village for 23 years. When I bought it in 1983 it was, in my 42nd year, the 42nd move of my life which tells you a bit about the restlessness of my early years. But I learned in those years that there is no better way to clear out the detritus than to move. Who wants to add to the weight the moving company will charge for, for things you don’t need anymore.

So when I was packing for this 43rd move, I was ruthless in dumping two decades of what George Carlin famously calls “stuff”. Well, sort of ruthless. There were three items which, as my arm moved each toward the trash bag, I couldn’t part with.

All three had originally been my mother’s: a particularly ugly jewelry box; a little, metal container for rolls of stamps with her initials engraved on it; and her address book – small, green and, after the thank yous following her memorial service, useless to me.

I don’t know why I can’t part with these three items and I still have them. Today, I am reminded of the address book and of all the times I have wrestled with myself about removing – or not – the names of people in my own address book who have died.

There have been way too many over the years and particularly back in the days when I kept contact information in books like my mother’s instead of on the computer, I would see the names of the dead from time to time and tell myself I should cross them out if for no other reason than to make it easier to find who I was looking for.

But I never did. I didn’t want to erase them from my life like that. Sometimes, although not always, when I was transferring everything to a new address book (remember when we used to do that?), I would even copy them over. Nowadays, I just leave everyone in my electronic address book – dead or alive.

But today, I am confronted with a new, although similar, question.

Over there on the left in the Elderbloggers blogroll is a link to Donald M. Murray, weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, who died on 30 December. He wasn’t really a blogger, but I included him because there is (oops – “was”) no one else alive writing so eloquently about getting old.

I am heartbroken that there will be no new columns from Mr. Murray and my dilemma, as with address books, is what to do about his link. It goes to the page where the Globe lists his four most recent columns until they moved the oldest, each week, into the paid archive. Undoubtedly, after a reasonable period of time, they will remove that page and the link will be useless.

But I am loathe to lose his name from the list. On the other hand, I don’t want dead (so to speak) links hanging around my site which make any blog appear unkempt and out of date and, after all, the living must go on.

What to do, what to do?