You've Got Mail

I was driving the gang to school the other morning. Although it takes barely 15 minutes door-to-door, it's an important stretch of together-time that I don't often get because I work from home. So on a day when our respective schedules meant I needed the car during the day, I found myself at the wheel. And as my wife and I often do when we drive, we talk. About the everyday yin and yang of life that you might otherwise miss if you didn't have in-between moments like these.

As we ran through the highlights of the day ahead, my wife told me she had cleaned up the voicemail on our home phone. I take the blame, because I'm a shameless message saver. Send me an e-mail and I'm more apt to archive and not delete it. Because you never know when you'll need it. Same thing with voicemail: I want to make sure Debbie hears the message before it gets deleted into oblivion.

That's how we ended up with 22 old messages clogging our inbox, the Whining Betty voice from the phone company not-so-politely advising us that our mailbox was almost full. Thanks, Betty, for the heads-up.

Debbie deleted them all. Except one: From my dad. He had left it a few days before he died. It wasn't anything earth shattering, just the usual checking-in-we'll-talk-later kind of message. "I just couldn't," she said, her voice haltingly trailing off into silence.

I felt the now-familiar wave of sadness that precedes unprovoked tears. I wanted to stop the car and just hug her. But we were in the middle of traffic, and the clock beckoned. It was her loss, too, and it's just as important for her to hold on to the digitized remnants of a life well lived as it is for me.