A week into my “Dad’s dying” visit home, my iPhone decided to stop working. Mom and I took it to the Apple Store, but they couldn’t make it work either. I had fortunately copied all the pictures off it earlier in the week, but that meant, since I don’t use iCloud for photos, that particular week’s pictures were unsalvageable.
I can’t remember if I had taken any pictures of Dad that week.
The next week, he died.
I took some pictures with my replacement phone, and those were saved. But when I finally got home and restored my phone from backup, I lost everything else I’d done during that time. Actually, I lost everything since December, since that was the last time I’d backed up the phone. No pictures, but notes I’d written. Text messages.
I keep thinking about how the last text messages with my brother Ben had been “You need to come to the hospital.” And how there were other texts, evidence of my trip to New York in January. And diary-type stuff I wrote in notes, gone forever.
You’d think I’d be used to losing things by now.