I deleted my old dentist’s name from my phone. He is now deleted from my life. Gone forever. Gone.

I remember his face, his voice, his mannerisms, the way he smiled, his reactions when I teased him. I recall some of the interesting conversations we had together. He had a daughter working for NASA in the US. He was so proud. Her photo was sitting on his desk facing me when we talked. And of course, I remember his soft movements when working on my teeth, his delicate hand, his perfect concentration that would spot my slightest discomfort and immediately do something to ease it. He was the best dentist I had had up that moment in my life. I also vividly recall his office, the dental operatory, even the ceiling as I lay on the examination recliner.

He was a shy man, probably 15-20 years older than me. Our conversations were so vivid and interesting that I was looking forward to one day inviting him out for a coffee to get to know him better. Most likely, he would have accepted my invitation and we would probably have become good friends. But every time I visited Athens from Nafplio, where we used to live, I had a full schedule and was always in a rush to finish all of my errands so I could depart from the hectic city as fast as possible. So, each time I postponed the invitation to the next visit. Until one day, five years ago, we left Greece for good. I never invited him for that coffee, and now I will never again visit his office – because I have a new dentist in Cyprus, where we live. When I think about it, I feel the sadness of regret, not dissimilar from the sadness I feel for opportunities missed with some of my deceased beloved while they were still alive.

The chances of us bumping into each other in the streets of Athens is one in a billion, as I rarely visit this city. I’m certain I will never see him again. Well, I cannot see him. I deleted his name and phone number from my mobile. In a few years I will forget his name too, and then his face. He is probably still alive, but I will not know when he passes away. For all intents and purposes, he is now dead for me. The rupture in our connection is now permanent. It is as if he already has died for me. He is as dead as all my friends and acquaintances who have truly passed away. For is not death but an irreversible final separation from the other?

Death is not only what happens with the arrival of the Grim Reaper. Death permeates our life through these permanent ruptures with our fellow humans. Dying before dying – this is the crux here.

These permanent ruptures are something quite new, a characteristic of the modern world. Notwithstanding the quite rare cases of emigration, they did not exist before. My great-grandmother never left Cyprus, and rarely if ever did she leave her hometown. Her world was enclosed within a small circle of family, friends, and occasional acquaintances that never extended beyond her town or district. When she changed her dentist, it was because he retired. She would have subsequently had some form of communication with him or known of his life and would definitely know when he died. She never experienced this dying before dying of modern man.

But the world my grandma was immersed in was no different from the world all of humanity was immersed in until only a few decades ago. One of my favorite authors, the Austrian Stefan Zweig, in his memoir The World of Yesterday, describes the cultural and social life of Europe from the beginning of the twentieth century to WWII. What shocked me was that even in Vienna, then a city of 250,000 people, he had known and met with many great men of the era who either lived in Vienna or visited it. The intelligentsia of Vienna (well, of … the whole of Europe actually!) comprised a small circle not much bigger than my grandma’s village. Zweig met with and befriended Sigmund Freud (he even spoke at his funeral), Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Hertzl, Richard Strauss, Auguste Rodin, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Emile Verhaeren, James Joyce, H.G. Wells, and many more. And of course, he followed the lives of all of them until they passed away or he himself died. Zweig could never have conceived of a delete button on a device that would forever cut him off from the people he came to know and interact with.

This is a solely a new phenomenon of a modern world that allows us to meet, interact, and communicate with way more people than we can ever handle; way more than we can ever truly include in our lives as friends or acquaintances. We travel often, move to and work in different cities, live in different countries. We correspond with people via email, on our phones. We have email friends (“e-friends” whom we never meet in person), subscribers to our blogs. Some of us have followers to our Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok accounts; some have even millions of them! Oftentimes, these followers communicate with the ones they follow, but the latter have no time to respond to them. Therefore, communication often becomes one-directional. These interactions are fickle, transient. And unfortunately, they are becoming the norm in the modern world. We are not interacting with the bodies of our fellow humans anymore. We do not see their faces, touch them, hear their voices. We are incorporeal entities, “human-waves” crossing paths with one another in a corner of infinite space and time and then vanishing, passing away forever.

I remember one of my subscribers with whom I became e-friends. He said my book had inspired him and he started traveling incessantly at the age of 87 in order to visit all the places he had always wanted to visit but hadn’t! He used to send me photos from his travels, write me long letters to which I always responded. One day he stopped communicating, and a few months later I noticed he had unsubscribed. Did he unsubscribe by mistake (some people do), did he pass away, or did he simply decide to stop reading my letters? I will never know. He vanished from my life as suddenly as he appeared. Gone forever. Gone.

I sometimes think of the tens of thousands of people I interacted with during my around-the-world journey – how 99 percent of them are similarly also dead for me. I have faint images of their faces and movements and mannerisms. I hear their voices in my mind sometimes too. Hundreds of vivid travel scenes are stored in my memory. With people I will never again see. As the years pass, all these memories become fainter. Eventually, most of these memories too will be gone forever. Gone.

These modern ruptures may be considered part of the overall alienation of modern man who has forever lost his once intimate and lifelong community of deep and long-lasting relationships rooted in the physical space of small distances. Yet still, when we become mindful of these ruptures, we may transcend them by reconnecting to a truth that is timeless and therefore persists in the modern world too. These connections we have formed (and will continue to form) modify and transform our being, carving something on our soul that never dies because it becomes a part of who we become. My dentist is gone forever, but my connection with him will paradoxically also remain forever. For I know that something of him, something imperceptible that I cannot pinpoint nor articulate, remains in me forever. 

This brings me to Cavafy’s beautiful poem (one of my favorites), which I translated last year and included in the chapter “Connections Are Forever” in Conversing with Cavafy. For in this poem he not only speaks of those who died, but also of “those who are lost unto us like the dead,” thereby describing an experience not dissimilar to the one I have been exploring here. Cavafy most probably had in his mind’s eye the many men of his casual homosexual encounters (“The poetic eyes, the pale face, those lips – I never found them again.”), rather than the modern phenomenon I’m here describing, but the idea is the same. I will conclude by quoting this poem, together with the chapter’s last paragraph, which describes how all “those who died, or those who are lost unto us like the dead” are never truly completely gone. They may be gone forever from our life, but they remain part of who we have become. 

Voices
Imagined voices, and beloved, too,
of those who died, or of those who are
lost unto us like the dead.

Sometimes in our dreams they speak to us;
sometimes in its thought the mind will hear them.

And with their sound for a moment there return
sounds from the first poetry of our life –
like music, in the night, far off, that fades away.

Like Cavafy, we may come to hear that the sounds of all the people in our life with whom we have formed bonds constitute beautiful music, maybe the music of a marching band that fades away just as we come to the end of life. For there is a “unique fatefulness” in all the connections and bonds we make. Each one of us faces the end with his own marching band and its own unique music. A band we have collected through the unique path that we have followed in our life. With the understanding that every connection we make becomes a part of this personal band, we should never cease to seek out the endless possibilities that lie within every human encounter we have.