Deleting the past

I've decided to become one of those people who just has a cell phone -- no landline. My father and aunt are very opposed to this turn of events, but then again, my aunt doesn't own a computer, and my father doesn't know how to work the VCR -- let alone the DVR or the DVD player. So I'm taking their complaints with a grain of salt.

Besides, if I need a landline, I have one at work.

What this means is that I'm donating a couple of phones to Goodwill, and in so doing, I've been sitting here cleaning out the memory of one of those phones.

Then I realized that I just deleted the record of the last time that my mother called me -- the last time that my mother will ever have called me. It made it real, I guess -- the death, the move, the moving forward. My eyes filled with tears and for a second, I could hardly breathe.