Lossiness

I’ve been taking regular walks in the woods. There’s nothing better than light cardio exercise to help with grief, except perhaps heavy cardio, but that sure makes it harder to relax afterwards. I discovered there’s a beautiful trail that goes from Mount Misery in Lincoln near the Nine Acre part of Concord, all the way up to Walden Pond, skirting the border between Lincoln and Concord with barely any sign of habitation along the way. I’ll often do a five-mile loop around the pond, taking a break in the middle for a dip at my favorite secluded spot along the bank under a big shade tree. I’ll swim around for a bit, then relax, sitting and meditating in the warm shallows with the water up to my neck. It’s therapeutic. One time over the summer, a heron walked by me in the shallows, very slowly with its long thin legs, completely tame and not caring about my presence one bit. Then a couple of yards away, it came to a halt. It waited, completely still. Then almost as quick as a blink, it l

Too bad! Now that you’ve encountered that unlikely phrase, you can no longer concatenate those words into an uncrackable password. It actually means something important to me. Years ago, I read a strange news account. One day, a man was frying up some salami for breakfast, and he noticed the burn marks formed the image of the face of Christ. He interpreted this as a miracle, a sign from God. Reading the full news account, you learned further that his family ate fried salami for breakfast every day for the previous 20 years. Aha! This immediately brought two thoughts to mind. First, as a matter of basic math, that means over 7,000 instances of serving fried salami, and unclear how many servings for how many different family members. But after that many iterations of frying salami, it stands to reason that eventually you’ll encounter a burn mark that resembles a face, possibly resembling Jesus Christ as popularly conceived. Second, basic intuition tells you this. Anyone who eats

A couple of years ago right after losing Aidan, we were holed up in my mother in-law’s condo apartment down the road, dazed, traumatized, and not yet ready to return to our home. We had the priest come over to help us plan the funeral mass. He arrives in his street clothes while my mother in-law is out running a few errands. You have to understand, she is a very old-fashioned Irish Catholic raised in an ethnically exclusive parish in Detroit. Even with the pedophilia scandal, and even with the virulent anti-semitism of Father Coughlin during the Depression when she grew up, she has a deep, unshaken reverence for priests. She arrives, was unaware the priest would be visiting, and so is somewhat surprised. But luckily, she never goes anywhere outside her bedroom without being impeccably dressed, complete with tasteful necklace, so she’s good. As always, she’s prepared for company. After the introductions and pleasantries are over, she sits down on the couch with the priest. We need to

This is the homily delivered by Fr. Austin Fleming at the funeral mass for Aidan McHale Sierra, Holy Family Parish Church in Concord MA, August 15, 2017: Since last week I’ve been reflecting on what I might preach this morning. And I’ve been thinking about to whom I would address my homily: to Ellen and Mike, Aidan’s loving mother and father? to Isabel, Aidan’s doting big sister? perhaps to Aidan’s young friends and their families? Everyone here today loves Aidan, but each of us in our own way, To whom might I speak, then — without leaving anyone out? Well, I decided to resolve that dilemma by preaching to the one person we all would love to talk to today. I want to speak to Aidan — and so I’ve written him a letter which I want to share with you. Dear Aidan, You’ve left a lot of people behind, people who love you — the very people whose love you knew so well. But, oh my, Aidan: you’ve left us with a lot of questions: hard questions, painful questions, mysterious quest

A few days after Aidan’s funeral, we still couldn’t manage to go back and stay in our house. Instead we headed out to Cape Cod, where a friend offered up his family’s house to us. Once we arrived, we heard some dreadful news from town. Another boy, named Dylan, was also killed suddenly. It was a horrible accident where he was riding a bicycle and struck by a commuter train. We were only distantly acquainted with the family, and their kids were in different grades than ours. Struggling to understand what happened, I found myself idly mouthing much the same phrase we had recently heard repeated dozens of times. Oh my god, I can’t even imagine what that family is going through. I stopped myself, and did a quick double-take. I felt stupid for saying it, out loud no less. But then I began thinking about it and stepping through it word by word. I realized I was right. I couldn’t imagine what they were going through, because I couldn’t imagine what it was we were going through. I was in the

One of the most useful tidbits I picked up from grief counseling was a simple insight from evolutionary psychology. Througout history, it was perfectly ordinary to lose half your children. We are built to endure this. It’s not exactly a pleasant thought, but a necessary one. Being reminded of it helped. I recall turning on the TV and being repelled by some loud, violent show. I turned the channel to a PBS station where they were showing what appeared to be a comfortably bland documentary about Goethe. And then I got blindsided. Just like that, he lost four out of his five children. Time to turn the channel again.

I took a long 55-mile bike ride today, and stopped a bit for a water break near the end. As I sat on the bench, I noticed an inspirational healing stone that someone had left there. Perhaps I was a bit light-headed from the ride, but I immediately interpreted it as a communication from my son: That is exactly the sort of thing he would say, and exactly the odd, out-of-context way he would say it.

Perhaps I didn’t give much thought when coming up with a name for these pages, but I’m accustomed to the term “lossy.” It’s a familiar term that refers to a general tendency towards irreversable loss. In my usual geek context, it refers to data. You can compress a video to a certain point and be able to get back the original data intact, but past that point it’s “lossy.” Or sometimes you get lossiness and “noise” when transmitting data over the air. This tendency is one of the hard truths you need to engineer around, kind of like “entropy” in physics. And funny, that word “truth.” Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to mean something that’s considerably less than “truth.” But “lossiness” is different. It’s more than just loss. “Loss” is a one-time event, but “lossiness” happens all the time. It precedes loss, and follows it. Loss simply brings it into sharp relief. Many memories of my son are now getting scrambled, and it’s maddening. I don’t recall if they actually happe

I’d like to share a dream of my son, Aidan. I had this dream a bit over a year ago, a few months after we lost him, some time during the winter of 2017/18. I had a couple of other dreams of him before this one, but with very few words spoken that I could remember. In one, I got to hug him for a long time and tell him how much I love him and miss him. I don’t recall if he said anything back. While hugging him, I pressed my nose against his shoulder, inhaled, and was able to smell him. I recall that very clearly, because he was at that age where he was starting to smell like a man. (We already had the deodorant talk.) It’s a common belief that you can’t smell in dreams, but not true. In another dream, we were all together as a family, visiting Aidan in a sketchy ramshackle house where he was staying for some reason with a mysterious woman. The front yard was filled with a mix of toys of various ages and random junk. I got to hug Aidan again as he came out from the house. Isabel went