June 2020 Craig my friend of nearly 40 years died from COVID-19. This was a hard blow and personally the worst effect from the pandemic. We had not seen each other since early March for what we did not know would be our last session of the Space Opera game I ran for my friends and on my smartphone was the last text I had sent him in early February.

In the months after his death, I never found the will, the heart, the closure to delete that text conversation. It sat there with other texts always on that tiny screen.

Yesterday his name vanished from the text conversation replaced by the cell’s number. I am assuming that Craig’s cell phone number has been reclaimed by the network and is ready to be recycled to a new user. It is logical, it is practical, it is required that these things happen, and it is an instigator of fresh grief.

Technology changes culture sometime is massive disruptive ways, the automobile did more than scatter communities it shattered the standard human family, and sometimes in small way we don’t notice fully as they happen. Several times now I have become aware of friends’ and acquaintances’ deaths by a post on their Facebook wall by their families a method both immediate and impersonal. This tiny thing, my friend’s name vanishing from my device, it a passage to another period in my life without his presence, without his bad puns, and without his unlimited generosity. An unalterable fact of life is that it goes on. It does not pause, it does not stop for our loss, our pain, our grief, and it sweeps us along.

Always.