Long before WhatsApp, there was Skype – a lifeline to all of us living abroad. Messaging platforms are taken for granted now, but at the time, it was ground-breaking. Skype shut down for good last week, but has always had a special place in my heart because of what it meant for myself and my mother.
It was February 2005, and I was a work experience student, sitting in the stairwell of my apartment block – 13 storeys high – in Paris. Every evening, people gathered there to ring home. We sat around a single phone box with a card loaded with prepaid credit. This was the level that the technology was at back then. But that summer, everything changed. After returning to Ireland, a lot of us Erasmus-bound language students got our own laptops. It was a turning point in personal communication.
Skype was created in 2003, the brainchild of a Swede and a Dane, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, and a team of Estonian developers. But it didn’t come on to my radar until two years later. As I headed off to Nuremberg for a winter semester studying German, it was to make a huge difference between my stint abroad in France and my time in Germany.
New laptop in tow, this pioneering free technology allowed our Erasmus generation to stay in touch with family in a way that just hadn’t been available for previous generations who emigrated: letters home or a once-a-week call were suddenly replaced with unlimited time on the computer screen. We could all chat as much as we liked. I was able to ring my mother whenever I wanted. Probably too often.
But Mammy died nine years later – and I was glad we had talked so much.
I look back now and wonder, how did we find the time? As an only child whose parents separated in my teens, I was very close to my mother. We also had our disagreements. In fact, we probably had a better relationship when I wasn’t at home under her feet.
Mammy was very funny and our conversations would be full of silliness and humour. She’d let me talk through relationships that hadn’t worked out. I’d ask her how to boil an egg (by the stage I really should have known), or to advise on some new plight in my mid-20s life. We had a Skype party when I quit my bureaucratic job for pastures new.
It was always a comfort to have my mother on the end of the line. She was the safety net that allowed me to explore Europe without having to miss out on life at home. We had great chats. I thank Skype for that.
It was, in some ways, like I’d never moved away. I could have been up the road, though I lived in Brussels, a thousand kilometres away.
Until my mother got sick. A phone call, from my father, to tell me. I flew home the next day. Mammy had a brain tumour, and it was advanced. She went through a difficult operation and was suddenly very unwell. Nothing was ever the same again. Mammy died nine months later, aged 55.
She barely used her laptop again in those nine months, and we never Skyped again. As her illness progressed further, she couldn’t talk very much. And I was so thankful we had had those years of conversations, waffling on about everything and nothing.
Much later, when I was going through Mammy’s belongings, I came across her agendas from those years. She had kept a note of our conversations. “Talked to Karen for three hours,” popped up more than once. We had talked enough for two lifetimes.
Skype went out of service on May 5th, and before that users and former users were told we could download our old messages by then.
I logged in for the first time in years. I looked at Mammy’s profile picture with a pang – a paint-by-numbers image of two dogs that I had made when I was nine and that was still hanging around somewhere. I’d forgotten about that. The waving emoji invites me to start a conversation. If only. My poor mammy. Tears brim anew. For a split second I can feel that carefree feeling, of when everything was just fine and she was still alive.
I clicked on the download button. I opened the files. There was nothing there. Our conversations were too old to be stored on the cloud.
I felt sickened, and kicked myself for not transferring them years ago. It‘s too late now. But would I even want to endure the sadness of reading back over all our messages if I had access to them? In 11 years, I had never tried.
I do one thing. I take a picture of the screen. It looks like another world. The innocent one you inhabit before you enter that club nobody wants to be part of – when a parent dies and you grow up.
Meanwhile, my father has taken over when I want to call home. No marathon chats, though. I now live in Iceland. Skype gave me the freedom to stay connected to both parents as I moved around the world.
Skype also heralded everything that came after – Zoom, Teams, and WhatsApp groups. I’m delighted for families who can now live abroad much further away than I ever did – in Australia, in America – and keep in touch with home. All of us, in far-flung corners of the world. Living our hybrid Irish-foreign lives. And I’m very grateful for what one piece of technology gave to me and my mother. A lifetime of chats, packed into eight years.
Goodbye, Skype. And thank you.
Karen McHugh is a journalist based in Reykjavik, Iceland
