Loss vs. lossiness

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 happened, or if it’s something I imagined. Even if Aidan were still alive today, this would still be happening. I’d be forgetting a great deal about what he was like when he was 4 years old, because I’d be so engaged with his new incarnation as a 14 year old. He didn’t live to see 14, so now all I have are photographs and an increasingly fallible set of memories, and I’ve stopped caring if they’re accurate or not. I just want to remember him any way I can.

Facebook’s “memories” app just presented me with one of my posts I wrote ten years ago. I didn’t often post things he said, because I figured he’d eventually be able to see them, and I didn’t want to embarrass him. Now I wish I repeated every word he said.

Thumbs-up from Aidan: ‘Once you’re dead, you don’t become alive again. It works well.’

He was four years old when he said that, not long after he started talking consistently. I recall he often said interesting things like that, but I don’t know the context in this case. What was he thinking about? What were the words that led up to that observation? Or did he kind of blurt it out, disconnected, as he often did? I’m sure this is when he was in the middle of his fascination with the idea of infinity, his initial engagement with very large matters. I don’t know where it came from, and it kills me.

I’m not sure if I’ll be writing much in this blog, or what I’ll be writing about. I’d like to describe how I’m responding to loss in a way that communicates something useful about what it’s like, without descending into mawkish self-pity. I’m not sure it’ll turn out that way. But I will try to ask myself, am I writing, or communicating?