I got my first email address when I entered grad school, 30 years ago this fall. Email still wasn't compulsory for students at the time, but I had a friend who was technical and who set it up for me on the university’s server.

The first emails were thrilling. I would sit at my giant computer monitor, connect to the internet over the phone line—that iconic fuzzy ringing sound—and hope for something from one of my handful of correspondents in my “inbox.” Like a mailbox! If I were lucky, there would be a little digital note from a friend halfway across the country.

But we were still sending mail in those days; I have fat hanging files stuffed with postcards to prove it. I recently wondered if I should throw most of that paper correspondence away. People I've long since lost touch with, some people I don't even remember, checking in from their travels, apologizing for not having written sooner, just saying hello. Do I need to remember all of that? The emails from those early days are long gone; why keep the postcards?

I think of social media, how I finally got off it after several attempts to pull that needle out of my arm. One reason I did—although not the main reason—was that, while it was gratifying to see pictures of their kids from people I went to elementary school with or whatever, I would naturally have lost touch with these people without social media. And that's OK. It's OK to lose touch. It's OK to not remember who that person was who sent you a postcard 30 years ago.

After my husband died in 2019, I lost my sense of urgency about email. It became a thing, one of many things, that was not a deathbed thing. If we don’t think about a thing on our deathbed, or the deathbed of our loved ones, we have to question its importance. Email is important only inasmuch as it serves the things we do think about on our deathbed. Which is, mostly, the people we love.

This week, almost exactly 30 years since I started using email, I received one of the most beautiful emails I’ve ever received. It was generous and lyrical, sent with love and received with the same. I marked it as important. I printed it out. It was worth remembering.