Who ARE These People?

I've often thought that there is nothing funny about losing my husband. They say that humor and laughter are great healers, and don't get me wrong, I have laughed during the past nine and a half months, but never at anything directly related to his death.

Until yesterday.

In my effort to tie up "loose ends", I've been signing into Bobby's personal email accounts. I already read his Verizon & Hotmail, but I hadn't gotten around to his Gmail yet. (As I've said before, my beloved, Mr. Computer Geek, had to have several email accounts. Don't ask...must be a computer thing.)

I signed into his email, to find emails from all sorts of people that I didn't know he knew! It puzzled me as to why he had dozens of emails from AT&T Wireless (his phone was Verizon), a Baptist church in another state (we're Episcopalians), countless jokes from his brother-in-law, Bill (he doesn't have a brother-in-law named Bill), emails from Peter, his accountant (our accountant's name is Mike), and lots of emails from MLB.com (he never once watched a baseball game on TV in the 19 years we were together). Who were these people, and why would they be emailing Bobby?

So I started to click on the emails. Bill's jokes were funny, and the emails from the Baptist church were inspiring. But it didn't give me any clue why he would be getting these emails. They were clearly not spam, but email that was subscribed to.

Finally, I clicked on one from AT&T wireless. It said, "Dear Ron". And it all became clear.

Bobby's name, of course, is Robert, and our last name is very common, like "Smith". So many people must have assumed that, using "Smith" as my example, "rsmith@gmail.com" was Ron, not Robert. Poor Ron is probably trying to figure out why he is not getting his email.

I laughed. Not a lot, maybe just a chuckle. But Bobby would have gotten a big laugh out of this, and knowing him, he probably would have emailed all these people to tell them about the mistake, and so Ron would get his email. He was that kind of guy.

Maybe I'll do it for him. Maybe not. After all, Bill's jokes are funny.