Motherboard

As soon as the news of journalist Anthony Shadid’s awful and untimely death started crashing through the Twittersphere last night, I was hit with a creeping dread. It was not unlike the feeling a little boy has when he’s certain that a ghoul is tiptoeing toward him from behind. Quite near me, there was something I didn’t want to see. And yet I had to look, however terrifying it might be.

I had a dead man’s email in my inbox.

As I typed “shadid” into my Gmail search bar, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something uniquely awful about possessing a digital communication from a person who’s passed. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. As I paged through the search results, looking for the digital object — which was now embued with something sucking and tragic — I tried to figure out this 21st-century vertigo.

In the meantime, after paging through some New York Times top-headlines digests with his byline, I found what I was looking for: “me, Anthony (2)” read the text at the left-hand side of the result. Subject line: “Your magazine piece is amazing.”

“Mr. Shadid,” read the salutation. “I just finished ‘Syria’s Sons of No One,’ and I want to thank you for (a) writing it and (b) doing all your tireless (and at times harrowing) work reporting from the field this year.”

It’s true — the piece really was remarkable. Just another example of his towering (and now lost) prowess as a foreign correspondent. You should read it. And at the bottom of the online edition, for some damn reason, the paper had listed his Gmail address. It was almost begging me to get in touch with him.

The rest of the message was a retelling of another true thing: the story of a time when, across oceans and deserts, I got a firsthand sense of the man. Quoth my past self:

You and I crossed paths very, very briefly, and in a strange, indirect way once. In the summer of 2006, when you were covering the Israel-Hezbollah War, I was a producer at WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show. You were kind enough to agree to do a live phone interview with us while you were on the ground in Tyre. When we finally reached you, you were in dire straits — a bomb fell near you, just moments before you picked up your phone for the interview. We said you should get to safety and forgo the live spot with us, but you insisted. You risked life and limb to make sure the story was told. That’s a dedication not easily forgotten.

I had told him to keep up the good work and all that and signed off, not really expecting a response.

To my surprise, a brief, sweet reply had appeared 13 hours later.

“thank you, abraham,” he’d written. “i really appreciate it. that’s a note i’m going to keep. all my best, anthony.”

My stomach turned with sad confusion upon re-reading it. It felt… wrong. What the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?

An email from someone who’s been lost exists in a written-media limbo. It’s not a hard-copy letter, ready for archiving or framing or fawning-over as an object separate from all other objects (unless you print it out, which seems crass).

Nor is it on the other end of the spectrum of ephemerality: it’s not a dead person’s blog or Facebook profile, here and gone as soon as a moderator wants to whisk it away. Google will never come and delete this email, just because he’s dead. It’s sitting with me, except that it’s not, in that it’s just a collection of ones and zeroes and pixels.

But what can I do to give it pride of place? Star it? Tag it? I can’t even bring myself to do that for reference purposes — I keep searching for “shadid” every time I want to find it. Anything else seems base and disrespectful. It’s hard to even copy and paste it.

For a moment last night, I pondered writing back. Something like, “To whoever is reading this now, I want you to know that I admired Anthony very much.” But that would be disgusting — a bizarre invasion of privacy. Indeed, the mere fact that I could email someone who’s dead — a somewhat famous person, no less, and one whom I’ve never met and have no mutual contacts with — seems perverse.

Here’s the core of the problem: Ultimately, what underscores the absurd (in the existentialist sense) and wasteful nature of Shadid’s departure is the actual text of his message. “that’s a note i’m going to keep,” he’d written. And in a previous era, you could argue that, in some way, he would have kept it after death. It would stay in some trove of paper letters he’d received, there to be read by loved ones on a journey through his fan-mail.

But the “archive” button is misleading. There is no archive. No one will save the message I sent to him. I’m the only one who will have it.

When you die in this stupid millennium, the vast majority of your communications are automatically, instantaneously, abruptly, and unsatisfyingly marked “return to sender.”