No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk, Unless it Spilt on Your Laptop

Last week while going to grab my laptop off of the kitchen table, I noticed that a glass of water was leaning dangerously close to my keyboard. I quickly up righted the glass, took my Mac and admonished myself for once again leaving my laptop on the kitchen table. I immediately felt relieved and grateful for a few moments, as I had already experienced a hard drive crash two years earlier and knew what it was to lose everything on a computer. I use my laptop all the time for my business as well as personal use.  I am flying out in a week to Vancouver Washington to do a big presentation and my almost completed power points are on this laptop. What I didn’t know was that the little bit of water left in the cup was all that was left from a full glass of water, that had already spilled into the keyboard and track pad. I have a cat who is a bit passive aggressive, and so when she wants to eat, she will often knock things off of the kitchen table to get my attention, until I feed her. Usually it is a stack of papers, but it could be anything. This day it happened to be a cup of water that unfortunately for me was positioned too close to my laptop.

So I took the laptop off the table, while expressing gratitude for walking into the kitchen in that moment, but as I began typing on the keys, I soon noticed that the shift key wasn’t working. Next the cursor wasn’t moving. It was then I slowly and painfully surmised after Googled on my iphone about frozen cursors and liquid on laptops, that the water had gotten into the computer after all. My gratitude quickly changed into panic while my head was spinning with all that I potentially had lost.

My first thoughts were all the photos on my laptop of my family and pets. All of my Flip videos I have been taking of my kids’ sporting events.  I love taking photos and the thought of losing them all almost brought me to tears.  Then I thought of all of my PowerPoint’s that I needed for upcoming presentations, my hours and hours of work on documents etc. I quickly went into worst-case scenario in my head. What if I lost everything? I felt overwhelmed with sadness, regret, frustration and fear.

Then, the grief counselor in me, who has sat with hundreds of bereaved people over the years, people who have lost their loved ones, began to admonish me. (Well not the grief counselor, because she would have been kinder). “Do you hear yourself?” I asked myself. “Pull yourself together. This is not life and death. You have lost stuff, not a loved one. You have only lost information and photos.  It isn’t the same as a death. It is nothing in comparison. I can always somehow rebuild most of the information but you can’t get a person back.”  All true , but that somehow didn’t console me at all. It only made me feel guilty on top of all of the other feelings that were still there.

It didn’t help because this was still a loss. It was a very real loss, even if it can’t compare to a death loss. In this day and age of technology when so many of us rely on our computers and phones as photo albums and record keepers for our important documents and personal mementos, this surely is a loss.  When something is taken from you in a moment, without warning, it conjures up some of the same out of control panic feelings that overtake us when we lose someone. Obviously it isn’t the same, but the feelings initially are similar. We feel unprepared, scared, angry and want to blame, feel like the rug was pulled out from under us.  When we are in places like this when it feels hard to breath, when we feel scared and  confused over not knowing what to do,  we need people to acknowledge how we feel, not to talk us out of how we feel.  We don’t need people to discount our feelings, to rationalize our situation or to tell us to “get over it.” Yet so many do just that. The best thing to do is simply be there for someone and tell them how sorry you are. (My own children have learned well about how to support someone in grief, that each one of them told me that night how sorry they were for me that this happened. I appreciated it.)

 I began to think of all the people I knew who had lost papers, dissertations, almost completed books, ireplacable photos, and other important documents on their computers which weren’t backed up. It is all loss. Loss isn’t just about death, divorce, loss of home etc. Loss is also about our stuff. Our stuff is that which we deem valuable to us.  Current losses tend to bring up past losses so I suddenly remembered when I lost my precious voice-mails of my children at younger ages, that I had kept for the past six years on my Blackberry, (having to resave every 21 days for years) and how in a moment of switching to an iphone last year, realized in an instant while programming my new voice mail on my brand new iphone, that those little voices on recording were lost forever. I was so sad, I cried. I felt devastated. I loved hearing those voice mails every few weeks. I blamed myself for not recording them earlier on a tape. I even secretly blamed the guy at Verizon for not asking me if I happened to have old recordings on my Blackberry as they wouldn’t automatically switch over, as if he is going to be aware that someone like me saved recorded voices for years.. Recently I have sat with a few bereaved folks who have cried sharing with me their feelings when they accidentally erased their spouse’s or mother's voice recording off of the home answering machine. I could certainly relate and never did I discount such a loss.

My loss was potentially my photos, which were memories over the years.  The thought of losing all of those memories made me think of all who had lost their photos in fires, floods or other such circumstances. What about those folks who made it out of their home thankfully alive, but lost their stuff, their prized possessions, their hand me downs from relatives who are no longer around, their favorite things. Did we acknowledge their loss enough? Or did we simply focus on the fact that they were alive and well, which is huge, but at some point later on, we still need to make room for their grief over what they did lose.  We need to listen to them share what they had to throw out, what could never be salvaged. We need to listen to what it meant to them to lose those things. In listening we validate thier feelings,  give them permission to grieve their loss, and we help them to heal.

So to all of you who have had a hard drive crash, dropped your phone in a bucket of water, lost information, damaged your laptop, your ipad etc, I want to say, how sorry I am for your loss.

And when a friend, co-worker or relative tells you they have lost their stuff, their hard drive crashed etc, please don’t say, you should have backed it up, you should have had Carbonite, you should have…. Simply listen and tell them how sorry you are. Let them express their frustration, anger, and sadness, upset. Just be there as you would for another type of loss.

P.S. My story had somewhat of a happy ending. I did have to buy a new laptop, which was unfortunate, however Apple was able to transfer all of my info from the old laptop to the new one, even the photos and all of my Flip videos. Apparently the hard drive wasn’t affected, just everything else. Plus I had forgotten that I had installed Carbonite, about a year ago, as an online back up system that automatically backs up your stuff daily.  So as it turned out I had my stuff backed up somewhere in the clouds as well.  Now I keep my laptop in my office.

“Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the external laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.”  ~Mark Twain

For more information about grief and loss that is not related to loss of computers, please visit my website: www.griefspeaks.com

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Take care,

Lisa