After my ex-husband Alex passed away in 2017, his parents insisted
on bringing some of his things to my apartment so our daughter Nadia could use
them. We got a lot of blankets and
pillow cases, notebooks he bought, but
didn’t use, from back in college, some kitchenware, even boxes of old pasta
from his kitchen. Two of my friends helped me move the stuff, which was packed
in thrash bags, to my one-bedroom apartment. One of my friends exclaimed: you need
his old soap holders?! I didn’t, of course.
But my daughter Nadia declared that we should not throw out anything
because the things were “soaked with daddy’s love.” She had obviously heard her
grandparents talk about his possessions in that manner. So I kept some things for a while and
eventually convinced her that donating them would be better than keeping them
in storage.
At the time it did not occur to me to ask about the technology
Alex had used daily. Months later I
learned there were laptops, a hard drive, and other equipment which he
purchased with his company’s funds. His business partner tried to retrieve it
and wipe out any client data that certainly had been on it. For a business that
provided security and identity management services, this seemed like a natural and
logical thing to do. But nobody seemed to know where Alex’s laptops were. Then,
I got a report filed with the probate court with regard to Alex’s estate. The
report said that it was not clear where any of the technology was presently
located. I had previously received
emails and texts from Alex (creepy, I know), but thought maybe his parents who
are using his old iPhone had sent those by accident.
After hearing, now on official paperwork for probate purposes,
that the laptops had been lost, I thought about the hundreds of hours Alex
spent, for work and for leisure, using these laptops. I thought about my
daughter’s birth certificate, our medical records, tax returns, copies of old
passports, pictures from trips together, recordings from theater performances:
it was all there. I also thought about how much Alex valued the security of his
personal information. In a way, I could not help but think that a part of Alex
himself had stayed with those machines, especially given his work as a software
architect.
I chose to fight for finding the laptops and
destroying the data that was on them. My
daughter heard me speak about destroying the laptops and once again said they
contained her dad’s love. She felt sad, so I asked Alex’s brother to provide
one of the laptops for her to use after cleaning out the data (he seemed to
have now found it). The response was that a 6-year old had no business
using a laptop. Instead of trying to explain this statement to Nadia, I did
something we often forget to ask others (or even ourselves). I asked her: what
do you want? “I want to have the computer daddy had when he was a child.” In
response to this, a dear friend found, in his grandma’s basement, an old laptop
he had received when he was 9. He gifted it to Nadia (picture below).
So, I said: this would have been the kind of laptop daddy would
have used as a child if he had one. (It doesn’t matter that he actually didn’t.)
I kept moving with trying to figure out where the computers
were. At some point during this ordeal, Alex’s sister in law from Texas proposed
the solution she could think of: we find the laptops and we shoot them with
guns at her parents’ ranch. I thought about Alex,
whose LinkedIn profile headline used to read “Identity Management Guru” and I
thought about how he really did spend more time with his laptops than he did
with his relatives. And now, his laptops were about to get shot with a gun at a
ranch in Texas. The irony, the laughter
and tears that this image brought to me are hard to describe. I try to describe them only because that is
the only thing we have left to do in this life: describe to others how we
really feel. After we are gone, that might just be all we have left them to remember.
You may say, who cares? Does anything remain from us in
the things we used and in what we created? Do we remain conserved in the things
we touch? Are our possessions truly soaked with our love? Or is everything
already perhaps “in the cloud”? Does a piece of us live on?
I did think about all of that as I pursued the legal battle
and demanded that the the laptops and the data be destroyed. Here was I,
trying to comfort a 6-year old and trying to figure out how $8K worth of
property somehow got lost and why messages were coming to me from a dead person's account. I was in the midst of all of this, when someone had just proposed that we shoot
at the problem. And that is when it hit me, pun intended, the proverbial “moment of clarity” just like
in that song by Jay-Z.
Yes, sometimes we forget to ask ourselves what we want, but we
also forget what we are fighting against and that is important. It hit me that I am in a rather absurd fight: fighting with legal paper against someone's lack of desire to do what is right.
But while some people around the world have to fight against corruption,
violence, hunger, and disease, I think all of us are stuck with something much worse: choosing whether to fight against a combination of ignorance, lack of attention, carelessness, a desire to always take the “easy
way out,” untrustworthiness, indifference, and thoughtlessness.
Guns do not really fight this kind of thing.
Words do.
