Computer lists outlive the entries

One of the great advantages of the digital life is that your portable calendar and address book can go with you anywhere. All of your contacts are in your cell phone or in your computer. There is no need to copy contact information from one year's calendar to the next, as I did for many, many years. It was a tedious annual task. Digital calendars are perpetual, and so are contact lists. Once you've entered the information, except in the case of a catastrophic failure, the data are always there.

But there is one disadvantage: The data might well outlive the people referred to.

I have just cleared the address book on my home computer of several entries who are no longer living. I stumbled across the entries when checking on some addresses of other people in the list. It can be disconcerting to scroll down a list of relatives and friends and realize, "they're dead" or "she's dead." Should they live on in the computer, the addresses and phone numbers that now belong to someone else, just in case you ever need to know a long-ago address?

The directory in my cell phone has the same problem. When I scroll through the list looking for the person I intend to call, I pass by people whom I'll never call again. And because I'm usually in a hurry whenever I'm using my cell phone, I never bother to delete those entries.

One of the most poignant and painful stories in American literature is from Norman Mailer's first novel, "The Naked and the Dead." He tells of an American soldier on a Pacific island during World War II who receives the tragic news that his wife has died in childbirth. He grieves. He mourns. He is devastated. But then, because it takes weeks for mail to arrive in the combat zone, he receives a letter from his now-deceased wife. Then he receives another. And another. He manages to convince himself that she's not really dead. She's as alive as her letters. But then the letters stop.

Like that soldier's letters from home, some entries in my digital address book give me momentary pause before I remember.