The Last Email

My In Box is always a disaster.

Several years ago, in an effort to help out Mother Nature, I sat with a enormous pile of paper catalogs and called each and every company and asked them to remove me from their snail mail list and send me e-mails instead. I’m now on all of their email lists.

Each morning I easily wake up to 50+ e-mails. Most of them I delete right away, others I save to read later in folders I have painstakingly made over the years, occasionally I am sent something that truly requires my attention or captures my interest or I’ll need for a later date.

I receive daily parenting tips and a quote of the day, my husband’s travel itineraries, notifications from my son’s school and his teacher, new blog post alerts from my favorite writers, notes pertaining to Avery and Austin and committees I am on, and tips and tricks from social media marketing experts to help me do my job more efficiently. Rarely there will be a note from a friend, but most reach out through Facebook nowadays. I try to be good about filing and organizing but sometimes I get behind. Way behind!

Case and point:

Needless to say, my In Box causes me a lot of anxiety.

I always found comfort knowing if I scrolled all the way down to the very bottom, there was the last email my father ever sent me.

The subject line is: sox and addresses and it is dated Thursday, October 11, 2007.

The Boston Red Sox were in the playoffs that year (they went on to win the World Series) and because of where my parents lived and worked at the time, in Tunis, Tunisia, they were unable to watch the games live so Todd and I recorded them and mailed them. Not the same as watching the games live as they were happening, but for a die hard Red Sox fan, my father was very appreciative. His message reflected that. He also shared that he and my mother had notified the school board that the 2007-08 school year would be their last in Tunis. Come June, they would be moving stateside!

He and my mother died four days after he sent the email.

The email itself is totally mundane but it meant a lot to me to see it at the bottom of my In Box and I loved knowing it was there.

Recently (sometime before December 15 to be exact), Lola had my phone and has savvy as I believe she already is with electronics, somehow she managed to delete every e-mail in my In Box. Not a big deal when I discovered it because I just moved all of the e-mails from the trash back to the In Box to sort through later.

Unfortunately, the transfer didn’t happen and all the emails remained in my trash folder.

Unbeknownst to me, I deleted my trash the next time I was on my lap top.

I am devastated over this realization. I lost several important items, most important, my dad’s e-mail.

I’m also grateful Todd made a PDF of dad’s last email a few ago when I thought I had accidentally deleted it. It’s not the same, but at least I have it.

This year I lost two things that deeply connected me to my parents, in July it was a pair of treasured earrings that were my mothers. I wore them almost daily and can’t go in to details without feeling sick over it and now this e-mail. I can’t help but wonder if these are signs. Signs of growth and peace. Or perhaps a way for the universe to see how I would respond.

Whatever it is, the losses hurt.

Now and always.

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