Why Technology Keeps My Dad Alive
Grief in Zero and Ones.
I found out the hard way that technology can immortalize trauma. Texts, voicemails, or photos can all be haunting fragments from the past, capturing fleeting moments we might otherwise have lost.
“Daddy had a stroke. Call me.”
I saw these fragile moments in the texts back and forth with my mother and sister during the days after my dad’s stroke. That first text was from my sister, warning me of the impending psychic pain we’d experience for the next nine months until my father died with dementia caused by a series of strokes. I was in the bathroom in the middle of the night, and my sister’s text surprised me. But her news didn’t. A year prior, he had had a minor stroke, a foreshock to what would come that fateful May night.
I stayed up all night, and the following day I found out that we had no water in our house. The well to our home hadn’t run dry, but eventually, our tears would. Nine months of mourning is a long time, from his first stroke to his death. We mourned his loss slowly from that moment on after that fateful night.
“Should we go down there?”
There was a flurry of texts to my mother, trying to figure out what to do next. My mother had left my dad years before but never divorced. She felt a lingering…
