Comparing the incomparable





I think my computer is dying. It runs really slow and keeps telling me the memory is full and I need to delete programs. It's missing a key and the number pad doesn't work. Baby Girl spilled my coffee on the keyboard the summer after Dan died so a bunch of the keys stick.  It's about four or five years old which I suppose is ancient for a computer these days. 

Dan and I bought this computer,  at the store, by ourselves.  We are not tech savy people, and are content with things like two year old phones and hand me down laptops. It was not the fanciest computer by any means, in fact I think it was the cheapest one the store had.  But it was the first computer we actually bought by ourselves and we were proud of it. It was kind of like buying a new car, for us anyway.  Dan set the computer up, again we are not tech people so that was also a big accomplishment.  He named it Klaus after a character in a TV show we were watching at the time. I don't really know why you have to name computers but I guess you do. 

In the scheme of cheap laptop computers it has had a good life. It has lived a long time and up to all it's potential. We have good memories on this computer and of course the worst memory of my entire life. I even have the video of Dan's funeral downloaded on this computer (I wonder how much space thats taking up? but really where else was I supposed to put that.  Every time I turn it on it says welcome Dan, not welcome Jenny. It has the picture of a camel from Israel on it as his profile picture. We always wanted to go back to Israel someday.  The password is our special password, our special code, the thing that is obvious to both of us but no one else. So we can both access our shared computer whenever we want. Dan hasn't touched this computer in almost three years but it's still our computer.

I can see it declining and have been able to for a long time. It is a proper death, old, wearing out, winding down, it had a good life. It's a sharp contrast to Dan, who wasn't any of those things. Well Dan did have a good life but he wasn't done with it by any means. He wasn't old, he wasn't winding down. We were just getting started.

Sometimes it's 2:30 am and I connect things like computers and actual human death, which has no comparison at all.  Because a computer is a computer and a person is a human breathing life.  One makes you go 'o that sucks' and one irrevocably and forever changes your life.  I'm not sad about the computer, it's just a thing, a technical annoying thing that has certainly given me more trouble then it's worth.  It is one more thing, one more piece of Dan I am letting go of. One more thing that will only be a memory and not a live active participant. I can transfer all the pages of Dan's writing (and mine) over to whatever new thing I buy. I can save all our pictures in 'the cloud' I'm pretty sure, although I don't actually know how.

I can save all my memories of Dan. I can type them all out on the computer. I can tell the world how we bought our first computer. I don't even have Dan here to tell me I'm telling the story wrong.  He can't do that when he's dead. Sometimes I wonder if I'm remembering a story right, you know I don't have that second witness to verify with. All I have is an old computer to hold my memories.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle

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