lost contacts

There is an aging-associated task no one mentioned to me, which is removing the dead contacts from your address book. Not the ones who drifted out of touch, although them too. The ones who have literally died. Your phone does not know this. It keeps them alphabetized, keeps them starred if you starred them, keeps offering to autocomplete their name when you type the first three letters into a search bar reflexively, looking for something they said in 2019.

I noticed it when I opened my favorites and did the arithmetic without meaning to. Three of four of my top contacts no longer have their mortal numbers.

A phone number is tied to a SIM someone eventually cancels, reassigned within the year to a stranger who gets a happy "birthday" text meant for a dead man. The interface asks nothing of you here. No ritual, no priest, no casserole. Just a "clean up your contacts" nudge from a settings menu that has become a bureaucratic encounter with mortality, one delete confirmation at a time, each with the same flat modal you would get for removing a duplicate of your dentist.

My grandfather, eighty, used to remark on this from the other side of it, the dwindling core of acquaintances less friends. He kept a paper address book by the phone, and once I watched him run his thumb down a column, stop on a name, go quiet for a second, then say a number out loud instead of the name. "That's six now" before moving on. I thought it was an old man being wistful.

An audit.

Then someone handed me the harder version. My ex father in law's mailbox, gigs of personal correspondence, entrusted to me as the family nerd. Priceless memories already doubtless fed to the gaping maw of AI somewhere upstream, but locally, on my drive, still his. And now I have to decide what a delete key even means at this scale. Delete a person? Betray petty grievances, possible affairs, positive affirming touch-bases that could make a family member's day years from now? Or train a bot on it, using the same rigorous local-LLM practice I use for myself, corpus kept private, never shipped to a cloud API, handled with real procedural care.

All that care was built for my own voice, with a consent I only have because it is mine. It does not transfer to a dead man's inbox just because I happen to hold the drive. The contact list did not ask my permission before surfacing who was gone. "Are you sure you want to delete Ex-Father-in-Law? This will permanently remove 30,000 messages and cannot be undone," worded like it's about storage. Just me, the drive, and no button that admits what it's actually asking.

The dwindling core of acquaintances less friends.