Apollonia IV

Saturday afternoon at approximately 4:23PM EST, my wife's iPhone, "Apollonia," suffered a heart attack while riding on the Capital Beltway. Doctors at the Genius Bar attempted an experimental battery transplant to no avail. She was pronounced dead on Sunday December 2. My wife is understandably inconsolable. Apollonia IV was her first and only iPhone and just two months shy of her second birthday. It seems like only yesterday when I brought her home from the Apple Store...

We had been trying for an iPhone since 2007. There was something about us being Verizon members that made it impossible. In the Winter of 2010, my wife decided to call it quits. We had allowed "New Every Two" upgrades to remain on our account for almost four years. "It's time to just accept that it's not meant to be," she said looking down at the burgundy carpet in the Bethesda Verizon Store. I wasn't willing to give up hope just yet, but trying to convince her only made her angry. "We could always just adopt a Droid." Hearing her say that made me shudder. There's nothing wrong with Android, it just wasn't what I wanted. I just wanted to see her smile. We convinced ourselves that we were doing the right thing. The "Buy one, get one free" sale didn't hurt either. We walked out as the proud owners of twin Droid Xs.

Three weeks later, they announced the Verizon iPhone 4. Fate can be cruel at times. It was too late to return them, and my wife swore that she was happy with her Droid. I made the tough decision to take my chances with eBay. A few days later I had four hundred bucks and I bought my iPhone. It immediately caused a rift between my wife and I. Too often, I caught her comparing apps between the two phones. "Why is it so clear on yours? Why isn't that app on Droid?" She moped around the house for a week. I couldn't take it anymore.

For Valentine's Day, I went to her job at lunch. I gave her a vase of flowers and a gift bag. Inside the bag was a box of chocolates and a framed black and white photo of me and my daughter. She was happy...and OCD'ish as ever. She noticed that the picture wasn't level inside the frame. It was an ugly boxy frame that I got for six bucks at Target. If only I'd been more attentive when setting the photo.

If I had caught it instead of her then she would've just sat the frame on her desk and gone about her day. At exactly three o'clock, she would've gotten a call from me at her desk where I would've told her about some cool new feature of my phone. She would've listened and feigned interest even though she would have been envious as hell.  I would've made it worse by dragging out the conversation for at least another two minutes until she heard her new picture frame playing "Overjoyed" (one of our songs). She would've been baffled at first as she tried to figure out where the music was coming from and, more importantly, how to turn it off. Eventually she would've removed the latch, opened the back of the frame and found her brand new iPhone loaded with all the apps she liked on mine, a photo album of us throughout the years and a playlist that I made called "I Love You." As a bonus, I put my number in the phone under "Best Husband Ever."

But that didn't happen. She noticed the picture was off-centered, and opened the back to fix it. I got a phone call of her screaming and all I could say in response was, "Goddammit!" Flash forward nearly two years and Apollonia is no longer with us. The stock market hasn't been as good to me this year as it was then, so I can't just run out and buy another one. I have to pick between a new phone for her or Christmas presents for my daughter. She doesn't even know why there's a fake tree in the middle of the living room, so we could get by. But I want to buy her gifts. So the best I can do is what I just did.

I called Verizon and deactivated the iPhone that I love so much that it has not left its case except to be polished and knelt before once a week. I dug my old flip phone out of a box somewhere and activated it on my line, then I put my iPhone on hers. It's the best I can do right now. So when you see me walking down the street with a portable CD player (I gave my aunt my old iPod once I got my phone), a digital camera and a cell phone duct taped together...don't laugh at me. I do it for love.