the app after life

by Ellen Wilson

WHEN I OPENED WhatsApp to share a picture of my dog in a group chat, I didn’t anticipate encountering the ghost of my dead dad.

I’m not sure what made me hit the “new chat” button on the app. I had already blocked Facebook and Instagram for the evening, so I was fidgeting in an effort to replace the dopamine hit of a notification. For whatever reason, I hit the green circle with a white plus sign at the top right corner of my phone screen, and my list of contacts popped up. I had carelessly granted WhatsApp access to my phone contacts when I installed the app years ago, and it provided a list of those who also use WhatsApp. I scrolled aimlessly, until I got to the end of the Ws and saw first my brother and then my father. My flip phone-using father who had died five months before. My father who all but stopped using his phone when he moved into assisted living eighteen months before that.

I do not come from a communicative family. If I do not call, it’s rare for anyone in my family to call me. Seeing my mother, brother, or father’s name popping up on my phone screen without my first having called them startles me. Seeing my father’s name show up on my phone’s Caller ID would induce panic in me, a sense that something must have gone horribly wrong—for example, the death of a childhood pet.

My mother’s name had shown up on my phone screen one Tuesday afternoon in September, causing me to excuse myself from a tour of a familiar building—I was participating in a dog-and-pony show internal interview for a promotion, being walked around the place I’d worked since 2007. While I stood in the claustrophobic, concrete block stairwell of the Biomedical Library, my mother told me that my father, who had contracted COVID a few days earlier, had become unresponsive and been referred for hospice care, where they would obey the “do not intubate” and “do not resuscitate” orders of his advance directive. I thanked her for calling and told her I would check in when I got home, then took a deep breath of stagnant stairwell air and rejoined the tour. A day later, he died at the hospital.

(I got the job.)

The Robert Wilson who shows up on my WhatsApp contacts is not my father. Most of me knows this. His number has been reassigned, but I have not removed it from my phone and thus I find myself staring at his name, wondering who Robert Wilson is now.

“Robert Wilson” is an eleven-year-old girl who got the iPhone for her birthday. She lied about her age when signing up for WhatsApp, and her parents haven’t spotted the icon on her phone yet.

“Robert Wilson” is a nineteen-year-old international student at Rutgers. He’s studying engineering and is terribly homesick, sending WhatsApp messages to Dubai at odd hours of the day.

“Robert Wilson,” age thirty-eight, bought his off-brand Straight Talk smartphone at Walmart after his last phone got cut off due to unpaid bills. His WhatsApp messages follow him from one cheap phone to another.

“Robert Wilson,” seventy-six, got frustrated with her Credo Wireless phone and decided to start over. She had moved across the country ten years earlier, and thought it would be nice to finally have a local New Jersey number. Her children installed WhatsApp and created a family group chat, but she never uses it. She’s comfortable with iMessage.

It becomes a ritual when opening WhatsApp to check my contacts, looking to see if any new information has been added to Robert Wilson’s entry in the contact list. There is nothing—even the default “Hey there! I am using WhatsApp.” message does not show up. There is no profile picture. I cannot decide if I want more information to appear.

I consider messaging this Robert Wilson.

Who are you? Are you good at math? Do you love dogs? How are your nerd jokes? How stubborn are you? Do you have a sweet tooth? Do you make homemade macaroni and cheese? The towel ring in the bathroom is loose again, how do I fix that? Do you remember the flabbergasting number of bugs that hit the windshield as we drove across Montana in the summer of 1997, and how we had to scrape them off the windshield with your credit card because the gas station didn’t have a squeegee? Remember when you came back from that conference in Switzerland with a suitcase full of chocolate? Is it peaceful where you are? Would it be weird if I told you that you have my dead dad’s phone number?

(It would be weird.)

I consider my options for dealing with his ghost on WhatsApp.

Option: Delete my father from my phone contacts.

Option: Revoke the WhatsApp permission for my phone contacts.

Option: Block Robert Wilson.

Option: Message Robert Wilson and hope I get blocked.

Option: Do nothing and continue the ritual of checking the contact list.

My husband tells me often that my problem is I expect the world to be a logical place, but logic fails me here. I do not believe in ghosts, but my dead father is haunting my phone. I can stop this, but I don’t. I wonder if the haunting is intended to make me believe my father is dead. There was a memorial gathering at the local craft brewery’s taproom in Sunriver —I even helped organize it—but I remain unconvinced that my father isn’t still in his apartment in assisted living, pretending not to know how to answer his phone.

Like many academics, I moved away from my family for a job. My father had done the same thing, as had his father before him. Although my father grew up in Maryland, his parents told him he was really from Oregon. He didn’t visit the state until he was in graduate school but the claim created a draw. When I was a child, we would visit extended family near Portland. My great-aunt, also my namesake, told me that I was an Oregonian too, even though my home was in suburban New Jersey. When my parents retired, they moved across the country to Central Oregon, our longtime vacation spot.

To get to my parents’ house from my home in Mobile, Alabama, takes three flights: Mobile Regional Airport to Atlanta, Atlanta to either Seattle or Salt Lake City, and then a final flight into Redmond Municipal Airport. From door to door, it’s usually about a sixteen-hour journey, sometimes longer than it would take me to get to Europe via Delta’s Atlanta hub and frequently more expensive. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about how much faster this trip would be on a private jet while I sit through the multiple layovers, nursing oversized airport beers at odd hours. These factors contributed to the infrequency of my visits for years—at most, I’d return once a year, sometimes less. One stretch lasted two-and-a-half-years, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. I would call my mother every few weeks and after we chatted, she would put my dad on the phone. Being from an uncommunicative family, this level of contact seemed normal, and I marveled at my husband talking to his family multiple times a week.

In early 2023, my father moved into a studio apartment in assisted living. His Parkinson’s had gotten to the point that my mother couldn’t care for him by herself, and neither of them liked the idea of caretakers coming to the house. After my father had a fall that brought the situation to a head, I flew out to Oregon and toured the assisted living facility with my mother. We found him a room with a vaulted ceiling and a view of the mountains, but I think he preferred watching the cars go by on Third Street.

My father took his iPad and his phone with him to the new apartment but stopped using them. My only way to communicate with him was in person. I started spending more time in Oregon so that I could check in with him and talk. He was not a natural conversationalist, so I created mental lists of possible conversation topics in advance. One stalwart was a discussion of the merits of the Airbus A321 in comparison to the Boeing 737. Sometimes I stopped at Richard’s Donuts on the way to his apartment and bought maple bars and coffee. My father maintained that breakfast was the best meal served at the facility, but he was always ready for a second breakfast when donuts were around.

When my mother needed open heart surgery in late 2023, I relocated to her guest room for six weeks to help out. Almost every day, I drove twenty-five minutes into Bend to visit my father and pass along news of my mother’s progress. Christmas fell during this time period, and I bought presents and stocking stuffers at Fred Meyer and REI. On Christmas morning, I brought my father to the house. We struggled getting him up the three steps to the door, and when the time came to leave, he struggled to get back in his wheelchair, but he enjoyed the day. It would be the last time he visited his house.

My father’s death was both slow and very, very fast. Parkinson’s is a degenerative illness, so we knew he wasn’t going to get better, but even with several months between my visits I didn’t notice steep declines in his health. Whenever I left, I made sure to say a real goodbye, knowing that our time was limited. The timeline, though, didn’t seem urgent. His mother, whose symptoms were more severe, had lived well into her eighties, and he was only seventy-eight.

By 2024, most people thought of COVID as a thing of the past. It still existed, sure, but it wasn’t the killer it had been. My father had had a bout with it about a year earlier, when there was an outbreak at the assisted living facility, and had remained mostly asymptomatic, so it must not have felt like an immediate catastrophe when he was first diagnosed. His main symptom was fatigue, not trouble breathing. It wasn’t until he was all but unresponsive that we realized it was serious and time ran out before I could get on a plane. Even my imaginary private jet wouldn’t have been fast enough.

I went to Oregon and my father wasn’t there. I helped my mother pack up his apartment. When the movers carried the last of his stuff out of the room, I cried briefly, until I could locate my stiff upper lip. We planned a memorial for six weeks later. I flew home and found myself adding to my mental list of future conversation topics to use while visiting my father. I told myself that the memorial would make it feel real. We gathered at the local brewery’s taproom. He had loved trips to the company’s brewpub nearby—the cobblestone patio around the restaurant made pushing his wheelchair from the parking lot to the entrance a workout—but he had never been to the taproom, an outing which I had promised to make with him sometime. His favorite of their beers, an IPA called Vicious Mosquito, was not on tap, but I brought a six-pack home after the event and drank one in my pajamas. Then two days later, I flew home to Mobile and back into limbo. I purchased an audiobook about the history of UFOs and my mental list of conversation topics became pages long.

My logical mind fails me. I know he is dead, but I don’t feel he is dead. Maybe his WhatsApp ghost is here to make me feel it.

When someone in your family dies, people say nice things to you. They say that they are thinking of you. They say to let you know if they can help. Often these are empty offers. They may not even bother to send a sympathy card around the office. They expect that after a week or a month, you have moved on and that they have been released from their empty promises. It has been more than half a year. Perhaps this is why I look to WhatsApp.

The logical thing to do is delete my father from my phone contacts, but I can’t bring myself to do it. My phone contacts are an archive. I still have the number of the guy who replaced our roof after Hurricanes Sally and Zeta in 2020. I kept my grandmother’s number in my last phone for two years after her death.

I consider revoking the contacts permission for WhatsApp, but it seems like a Band-Aid. What I have settled on, for now, is leaving my father’s ghost in WhatsApp and tapping into the list of contacts in the app to see his name. Tap new chat, scroll, mourn, repeat.

About the author:

Ellen Wilson is an academic librarian, dog mom, and pizza aficionado who lives, works, writes, and reads in South Alabama. She is a participant in Pacific University MFA's Body Chronicles program and has audited a semester of nonfiction with Pacific MFA. She has previously been published in Cleaver Magazine. You can find her on Substack, Instagram, and Bluesky.