Relationships don’t end just because someone dies. Man, do I miss Pete now. He’d have had some really priceless things to say about the state of the world today.

I Don’t Delete My Dead

What Pete’s Missing

Pete’s still in my phone. He was only sixty years old when he died in 2012. For a long time I had a voice mail from him, too, and if it wasn’t for the phone dumping it, I’d still have it because I don’t delete my dead. We’ll get back to Pete.

Some of my dead linger on social media but most of them are in my phone. My dead started dying back before there was much social media.

In fact, my dead began dying before I had a cell phone. (948–2245. That’s the phone number we had when I was a kid and it wasn’t until I was flying home after Daddy’s funeral and thought about how a stranger would now answer the phone when I called that number that I finally could cry.)

So, yeah, Pete. Pete was a real character and some people couldn’t stand him but, as one mutual friend pointed out, Pete would walk through forest fires for his friends.

He made cranky into an art form. I came to realize that Pete was one of those people who wasn’t happy unless he was miserable and letting the whole world know it.

He was an incel before there were incels; their patron saint if you will. Pete also had a number of what I called push-button rants. Push the button and stand back.

One of his favorite buttons was New York Isn’t New York Anymore. He could rage for a solid 45 minutes on how great it was back when Times Square was a sleaze pit. He rhapsodized about having to stomp going up the middle of streets in Soho to keep the rats away.

We went to a midnight showing of the movie “Brazil” one night back in 2004 on the lower east side. Coming out after the movie he launched into this favorite theme as we found no place open to eat (Katz’s didn’t count in his book because it had become a fucking tourist trap).

Pissed off, he went home to his $475 a month, 5th floor walk up at Mott and Houston and I headed back up to Harlem where I got off the train at 4 am and found Mama’s Fried Chicken doing a brisk business. I couldn’t resist calling and telling him that.

More than once in the past couple of years I have wished mightily that Pete could be here to see “his” New York trying to make a come-back.

My dead on social media get shout-outs on their birthdays or when Facebook helpfully suggests a memory. Those can be a little jarring, but not enough so that I’d ever considered blocking Robert F’s page.

He may be dead, but he’s still my friend. Robert was one of my first and dearest friends when I moved to New York and his smile, his deep and beautiful belly laugh is still with me.

As he struggled through the final stages of his illness the staff at Beth Israel marveled at how the visiting room was packed with his friends day in and day out. We all went even though he was too weak to see more than one or two of us for minutes at a time each day.

After he died a friend brought me several of his collage pieces which I took to Burning Man to burn in the Temple. I’m among many who “love” those memories when they come up on his Facebook page.

Not only is Robert still our friend, but the very love and support he brimmed over with also gets passed forward by the men he cared for over the years. There are lucky young men who are the recipients of Robert’s love and wisdom who never met him.

Lee was my angel. She had 12 kids and was a born mother. I was raised by a woman who, like myself, didn’t really want to be around kids (the tragedy for Mom was that she was born in 1932 and had no say in the matter). Lee mothered me but never gave me a pass on being stupid, selfish, fearful, or mean.

The last time I was with her was the winter of 2010 when her kids rented a small bowling alley to celebrate her 80th birthday. Not all 12 could make it because not all 12 were alive. Lee never deleted her dead either. Those kids and grandkids who weren’t there in the flesh were there in Lee’s love and spirit.

By this time, Lee had sensibly surrendered her driver’s license and was having trouble with her short term memory. We stayed up very late that night, talking and talking.

She might have had to ask me the same question six times about something I’d said fifteen minutes earlier but she remembered every detail about our years together when I lived near her.

Tellingly, she would laugh and say, “I already asked you this, didn’t I?” when this would happen. She never seemed to be frightened or angry about what old age was stealing from her. Because of Lee, I know that can be done and I want to be as much like her as I can.

Lee wasn’t on social media but her number is still in my phone. There’s a bridge in Central Park, down by 66th Street, where one night I sat talking with her for a very long time.

She’d been the one to push me to move to New York and loved hearing about my adventures and missteps (she’s also the one who laughed her ass off when I got my first “B” in college). I never pass that bridge without remembering that night and that conversation.

There are so many others (and more all the time). There was William who loved putting assemble-it-yourself furniture together. The bookcase he put together over 16 years ago still holds about half my books as well as an inordinate amount of clutter.

I’m kind of glad that my dead don’t go away. Each time I see Pete’s number or Lee’s in my phone I feel like in some alternate reality I could just dial that number and have a little chat.

Granted I can cherish the memories that social media chooses to pop onto my screen because, while those deaths brought great sadness, none (yet) tore my heart out.

That’s coming because I love and am loved. I suspect there will be a time when I have to shield myself from the mindless “sharing” of social media, but I won’t delete my dead. Not even those whose deaths are the stuff of 3 am anxiety bumps.

One of my dead, however, isn’t in my phone and won’t appear in any social media feed. George died before I even had a computer. And it’s quite probable that I’m alive today because of him.

He cared for me when I was (in the words of a mutual friend) no winner. I couldn’t stay with him but the day we divorced I came clean about the rotten stuff I’d done during our five years together (he knew) and thanked him. Less than a year later he was dead. There’s no grave, no marker, no place where George “is” except in my memories.

I guess my dead won’t really be dead to me until I’m dead. Until then I talk to them, think of them, talk about them with other friends, and continue to care about them. Maybe it’s not even possible to delete our dead.

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