Messages

by Lucy S.

I finally listened to all of my old cell phone messages and deleted some to make room. Not much room. I can't bear to delete many of the messages. I can rarely bear to hear them. My phone service makes me make my way through the old ones to get to the new ones, so I hardly listen to any messages and that means I don't delete even the new unnecessary ones till months go by and people scold me for denying them space to leave messages.

The first is from Catherine in May 2009. She invited me to join them all for one last round of photos and some time at the coffee shop near campus once frequented by her son and other grad students, and herself as well sometime during her grad student years that began in her late 40s. Her call called me back to the education that I'd fled or been forced to abandon or just set down for a while, depending on how I think about it. Whatever it was, I took the call that May day at the park and rushed to make it in time.

I talked Justin into going with me. He even took a few photos so that the professional photographer could also join the rest of us in a photographed memento. We were there to remember Catherine's son one last time. He mentally broke down near the end of spring semester 2006 and died endangering himself.  A year later, she and his father launched a scholarship in his name and asked me to write a piece for the book about him, so I did. I didn't know him well. I was writing to provide a glimpse of the Andy we knew in class that last semester. Others who knew him much better - mostly his fellow grad students and his own family members - wrote far more. And before some of the grad students went off far away with doctorates in hand, Catherine asked me to join them for another remembrance.

I can't erase that message from Catherine.

Next is a message from my uncle Alto. It's from August 2010. His voice is already altered. The ALA or Parkinson's variant or whatever the hellish neurological disease was supposed to be was already slurring his voice and weakening him, and I hear hurt - I always hear hurt - in his voice. I wonder if I called him back that same day or waited another day because I thought I didn't have enough time right then for a long call, and our calls were always so long.

The next is from Alto again, October 2010. He's saying he wants me to know he's gonna get me the money he borrowed, that he'll have a thousand of it in January and February. Then there is another message from October saying something similar, so I must have not called him back that day or the next and he must have felt anxious to make me believe that he really would do it.

It wasn't my money. It was my kids' money. It was $2000 that he borrowed for a desperate attempt at an alternative cure, and I could never have said no if I had any way to get a hold of that money. My kids said yes afterward, too. I don't have the call recorded, of course, when he asked. I'm proud that I said yes right away, and proud that I said it was fine when he kept deferring the partial payments, but I'm not proud that when my dad finally went there that following summer, I asked if he could ask Alto if it was okay to get one of the checks. I was feeling guilty for lending out my kids' money. My dad did get $500 of it.

But it makes me sick that I asked. It was the one time I failed my uncle. I like to pretend that I didn't fail him and didn't care about the money, but for some reason in that summer week of 2011, I had my dad ask. And then my uncle asked me why my dad had asked him, and if I had thought he wouldn't pay me, and i felt such a horrible shame and felt an apology that could not be spoken because it would only have hurt my uncle more.

By then I knew that my uncle hadn't borrowed the money for a treatment, but to try to keep his daughter Isabel from losing her house -- but we never spoke about that to each other. I was hurt on one level that he'd lied to me because he knew I could never say no to helping him try something that might save him. And on another level, how could I really be upset when he'd done it to help Isabel? He probably feared that I'd say no if I knew she'd overspent and was in trouble. We all partly failed each other over that money, and we all came through to some extent.

He paid me the rest when he was dead. My Aunt Dolores said he'd insisted she promise no matter what to pay me back, to pay the kids back, out of the insurance money. He'd told me that I knew he'd never hurt the kids. And there that too tender story sits in his messages on my phone.

There are three messages from my father, Alto's twin, and my dad sounds so strong and healthy, and now I have to preserve these messages, because I have learned to be afraid of loss.

And there are two from the friend of my life, Gloria, and again, I will let them remain.

And there is one from my friend Amir during a particularly hard time from an airport.

And two from my friend Jiji, now on the other side of the world.

Tonight I finally removed the ones I didn't need on there. If I get some from my kids or my mom or other dear friends or Carmen or Johnny...  I may have to live without space for messages on my cell phone anymore.

If only I could move these messages somewhere safer than where they sit on hold on my current cell phone service.

I keep written messages, too. Letters, cards, emails filed under the name of the friend or family member, as if I could hold our fused life moments and atoms of us ourselves alive forever in the messages.

I wish I had even one email from Roscynda. And we have no remaining trace of her voice – nothing. I want to hear her again. How did we all let that happen?

So I keep my messages. I give them their undisturbed space, waiting, unseen and unheard for months and years. Then I read or listen again. Old and new lessons get learned. They re-sear me, or musingly trace themselves; hurt is acute again from our small and larger failings (mine, people I love, the amorphous society’s), and it’s tangled up with forgiveness. Or mainly, I just miss the message-speakers so much. And then I don’t care if we would do better this time; I only care that we existed and exist together.