DEAR MISS MANNERS: Is it ever considered appropriate or acceptable practice to leave the voice of a deceased person on a telephone answering machine -- especially for three years after the date of death?
I can accept the fact that this person is no longer living, and I feel the answering machine should be replaced with a new answering machine with the voice of the surviving spouse. The voice of the deceased and the answering machine could be stored somewhere if it is important that this voice message be saved. I am interested in learning your opinion about this.
GENTLE READER: Miss Manners is interested in learning something herself. She would like to know what relation you were to the deceased.
Can you not bear to hear that person's voice because it gives you a moment of false hope and then tears you apart when you remember that you will never again hear that voice live? In that case, you could gently plead with your mother, or whoever it is, to change the message for your sake.
Or is it your object to give etiquette a bad name by using it to poison the harmless little comforts of the bereaved?
If so, you are not alone. Grief (in others) inspires a great many souls to deliver etiquette pronouncements that are as unfounded as they are unrequested and unkind. There is a whole division of them devoted to telling widows who have been using their husbands' full names (as in "Mrs. Humphrey Hillwood") that etiquette now requires them to be "Mrs. Harriet Hillwood." Etiquette requires no such thing.
Nor does it require people to expunge the recorded voices of the dead. Miss Manners can assure you that the strictest rules of Victorian mourning etiquette had nothing whatsoever to say about answering machines.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: I was rather stunned to receive this note written in a holiday card from an old high school chum: "I wish we were closer so I could tease you and know you would take it in the right spirit, but I'll try anyway. I love your art, but the laws of holiday cards say you can't send the same card two years in a row. Wishing you the best always!"
As a professional artist, I enjoy going to the effort (and expense) involved in designing a new holiday card every year, so it is highly unlikely that I am guilty of the suggested offense. Furthermore, I wrote and sent the cards from my home, confident that any leftover previous years' cards were safely stored in a cabinet in my studio across town.
On the chance that I did commit a transgression, however, I immediately sent "chum" a "this year's card" with a polite note telling her that this was the card she was supposed to have received, and that if I did in fact send her the same card two years in a row, she was entitled to tease me mercilessly. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
GENTLE READER: The only point on which you and your chum seem to disagree is whether you actually did sent her the same card this year as last. Miss Manners hasn't the least idea.
Her thoughts on this matter are therefore straying to questions of her own. Why, she wonders, do you both believe that annual novelty is strictly required for what is, however attractive, merely the paper on which to send holiday greetings? And why is your friend trying to pass off chastising you as wishing you the best?
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