Freudian computer death

Or: screenshot grief and the dialectic of woo

I got a new computer for school. I did not anticipate buying a MACBOOK NEO (it’s “citrus,” fyi) to be an emotional experience. And it wasn’t until I began the process of wiping my cursed 2020 MacBook Air and realized it was the last computer I had when my mom was alive. That seems like a normal sentence to type.

My mom has been dead for 2.5 years and while I am obsessed with reading/thinking/writing about death and dying, I am not that interested in grief. Or I should say: I am not that interested in my own experience with mom grief. Mostly because it has been straightforward and — hard to find the right word here without sounding either monstrous or delusional — kind of nice. Sad, sweet, regular; even boring. I feared I would have regrets, but so far, I don’t. I grieved so much when she was sick that mostly I’ve been okay. I hear her voice in my head all the time, sometimes I get weepy in my luteal phase. I find myself wishing I could ask her some random question, like where is this bracelet from or did you ever get hot flashes? There’s the heaviness of feeling like I can almost but not quite see the entire span of her life; that I can hold it in my head and turn it around.

Granted, if any of the circumstances were different, everything would be different, but basically, compared to the wrenching and relentless eighteen months of her illness and death, grief has been a fucking walk in the park.

a text she got the day after she died. gather ye rosebuds, people

And then I engaged in a doomed attempt to get a trade-in rebate on my old computer, which required wiping the hard drive. It was only when my unemployed ass decided going through every local file manually to decide whether to delete it that I realized I was working something out.

iMessage for desktop was where I really got stuck. In phone world, my texts to auto-delete after a month. In computer world, iMessage stopped functioning in mid-2024 (I’m sure it’s my fault somehow). Every day when I booted up the laptop, a thirty-minute process at this point, my text history with my mom would pop up.

Due to death admin, our last few texts are just me texting myself her password reset links. A symbolic leap from 12/25’s “Merry Christmas, Mom,” to the more sobering, “If you would like to cancel service for your loved one’s phone number, please contact Customer Service,” of January 5th.

Even before my Oedipal takeover, though, our exchanges are unrepresentative of our relationship overall. Aka, me being delicate and generous, her actually accepting my help. Obviously I saved them anyway, reminding myself of the way I used to print out AIM chats with crushes circa 1999. Except you know, the opposite.

“Could I ask the social worker to visit you when you go get fluids?” “Any more talk of hospice?” “Can Dustin come over and set up your tree?” (The last one is a great memory because he came home so baffled by the tv show she made him watch with her. It was Virgin River, lol.)¹

Then there were the condolence texts from friends. A funny thing about losing a parent is that it’s your old friends that have the best stories. My midlife comrades have certainly heard more armchair psychoanalyzing, but my mom didn’t cart them around in a minivan to Applebee’s or scold them at sleepovers for watching Loveline, you know?

A favorite came from my college best friend, Chris. For context, he spent the first two years of undergrad in the closet, and I spent those two years professing my love to him and begging him to explain why he didn’t want to be with me:

Oh the hours I spent on the dorm phone with my mom, analyzing all the “mixed signals,” until one day, probably fed up with my bullshit, when she yelled “MEAGHAN HE’S GAY,” into her Nokia. My reaction was somewhere along the lines of this reel but age 20. “He just likes those quarter-zip sweaters!”

I reread every variation of group text my mom was in and the ones she was pointedly absent from. They were mostly boring. Though something about this exchange from her week in the ICU when we all thought she was going to die really brought me back:

me:

File Transfer: MyChart - Hospital Admissions.jpeg

Zaddy’s notes ^²

sister:

Want anything to eat?

me:

argh yeah

sister:

Pizza salad or chicken on the bone lol

me:

Omg not chicken on the bone

Maybe a salad? With ranch

Like a salad mom would disapprove of

Remember when [aunt] blamed [uncle’s] failure on affirmative action 😱

cousin:

I chose to ignore that one lol

sister:

Coming back w indulgent salad

me:

Talked to the doctor, said fluids wouldn’t help her right now and she’s fine. Shift change is at 7pm — literally counting down the minutes to never see nurse glenda’s face again. I guess I should eat something

The unthinkable prospect of eating chicken on the bone while surrounded by death. The filial rebellion of ranch dressing. The balletic cafeteria-bathroom-water bottle refill- bedside. Her platelet level: 6.

Why do I feel like I need to be the keeper of this information? My immediate thought: if I don’t, no one will. And if no one will? It won’t matter at all. The worst part is everyone will be fine. Except for me, that is, because I will be swallowed up by the void.

NO REBATE.

It’s fucked up that the loss of someone from this earthly plane is most felt in not getting texts from them anymore. I’m convinced I’m totally fine until faced with the idea of deleting my mom’s contact info from my phone. I watched her take her last breath and prepared her body to be taken away but this?

proof of life

On the first anniversary of her death my sister sent me a recording one the three of us had with the hospice chaplain. I did a lot of these recordings that year, my most cherished files.

I don’t know what you imagine a chaplain to be like, but this person was a redhead Unitarian Universalist, appx age 30, who clocked our family dynamic immediately. She was a degree of woo that is normally beyond my tolerance but given the circumstances I let it unfold without protest.

“Some people say they will leave signs or visits as a type of bird or a song on the radio,” she said to us. “Would you like that?” My mom said yes. My sister, too. I kept my mouth shut.

More gentle prodding followed. “Do you want to tell the girls now what kind of bird to look for?” A robin, perhaps. A finch? A starling. I managed not to make any disapproving noises.

My mom, at this point is in the middle of what is known as terminal lucidity, sits up in bed. “No,” she says, matter-of-fact. “I don’t want to say ahead of time, they can figure it out.”

Thanks, Mom. Unfortunately I don’t believe in the bird thing. I have a crow literally go on walks with me and the dog, following us for entire city blocks. My mom loved crows. The bitch had crow statues, crow magnets, crow novelty t-shirts. She mail-ordered peanuts for them in bulk. This crow is literally WALKING beside me. Still I do not believe. Also my husband told me it’s because he feeds the crow treats when he walks the dog. The crow is recognizing the dog, not me.

My main objection to people visiting via bird haunting is I sincerely believe that the point of death is that it’s over. Or that the point of life is that it’s finite. The rest of us are left to puzzle over our memories and our screenshots, to try to make meaning out of the beginning, middle, and end. As a writer, obviously this interests me. Finitude of a life is a container, a frame, within which you can make meaning.

My sister would say that if you see the crow and think, “That’s not her,” then you are still thinking of the dead person, so in that sense, they’re still visiting you. It feels very Freud on negation. Almost Hegelian, also: The dialectic of woo. I have to hand it to her.

In fact, the way Freud talks about negation is very on-topic:

‘You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.’ We amend this to: ‘So it is his mother.’ In our interpretation, we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and of picking out the subject‑matter alone of the association. It is as though the patient had said: ‘It’s true that my mother came into my mind as I thought of this person, but I don’t feel inclined to let the association count.”

Rude.

If you’re insisting that really, this doesn’t mean anything, aren’t you always only showing your hand?

It also reminds me, apologies in advance, of the fort/da bit in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud has this story about his 18-month-old grandson, Ernst, who has a little baby toy on a string. A bobbin, maybe? I am not an expert but the gist is: Baby Ernst keeps throwing the toy outside of the crib only to experience the joy of getting it back.

“Fort!” Ernst shouts — “gone!” — when he throws the toy out of sight. Then “da” (“there!”) when he reels the toy back in. It reminds me of Grover’s Near / Far bit on Sesame Street. Near, far. Gone, there.

For Freud this little repetitive game is about mastery, or the desire for it. Naturally, my man has got to ascribe a deeper meaning:

It was related to the child's great cultural achievement: … allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.

A stretch for baby Ernst on the symbolic level but my toy on a string is a little more on the nose. Delete / save to cloud. Near, far. Copy, paste. Mother, not-mother. Back, not-back.

Today I got an email from Apple to say that my trade-in was worth zero dollars.

Freud again: It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play.

1. Actually that reminds me: please be careful when watching movies with the dying. The last movie my mom ever saw was Saltburn.

2. Her pulmonary interventionist was incredibly hot