I believe there’s a moment most people go through when they’re growing up when they truly realise their parents are mortal. Unfortunately for some that is accompanied by actual loss, but for many it’s just that moment when you realise there’ll be a time when the parent is no longer around.
For me, I first had that moment where I realised my father was mortal when he was involved in a serious car accident (he was a passenger) when returning from work. He survived physically but the mental return from that was a longer haul because of the mood-altering drugs he needed for pain relief for the long recovery. For my mother, it was when she was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy several years later and given six months left to live. Thankfully she beat the odds and is still pottering around in now very good health in her 70s, but those first few years were – to say the least – hair raising.
And at age 51 (let’s face it, based on my profession I’m hardly a risk taker) I realised there’s also a moment we get where we realise we are also mortal. Where I realised I am mortal. (If my COVID experience earlier this year had been more serious, perhaps I’d have had that feeling then, but despite it being a somewhat rough first time with the virus, it was was more like a bad flu, which I’ve had before, so less of a novel experience.)
That moment came tapping on my wrist this week at 4am on Wednesday when my Apple Watch woke me to warn me that it seemed I was in atrial fibrillation with a very high heart rate. So off to the emergency department we went where I explained to the thoroughly bemused triage nurse at check-in why I was there … well, she was bemused until she took my pulse.
Ironically that morning I didn’t have early morning meetings – my first was at 7am, and I (perhaps naively) took my work phone to the hospital with me “just in case I need to let them know I was running late”. Before I was discharged I’d cancelled or declined two days of meetings, because my heart rate remained stubbornly high for more than 24 hours and it took the threat of getting slapped around by Packer-Whackers before my body abruptly decided it was time to switch back over to a regular sinus rhythm.
It was a somewhat sleepless period for me. I’m poor friends with sleep at the best of times, but hospital beds are not what I’d call comfortable, and being a side sleeper with a lingering coccyx injury, at times just the act of remaining laying down was excruciating. (I spent long hours just sitting in the chair beside my hospital bed.)
Between reading an entire horror sci-fi book (quick review: at times thrilling, not what I’d call horror, good read, I’m enjoying this trilogy – it’s book two), regularly running a new ECG reading on my watch (just to see how I was tracking) and periodically triggering all sorts of excitement (for bad values of ‘excitement’) for the nurses (“sorry my heart rate just went up to 155bpm, I was taking my socks off”), I did finally find myself contemplating my mortality and … that got me morosely annoyed with myself for my lack of preparation for such an event when it comes to the state of my home IT environment.
At times I’ve made a stab at documenting our home IT environment, but I found myself thinking in the moments inbetween that should somehow The Bad Thing happen, my husband would be a stuck with a home network that would be an absolute mess for him to simplify. The DNS server. The DHCP server. (Same box.) Which of the NAS servers is the main home fileserver and which other ones are backup storage? What systems could he just power off and sell, and what systems have data on them that really should be erased before getting rid of? How would he know that it would be simpler for him to revert the Fibre modem to factory settings and just throw out the DHCP/DNS server without my needs there to muddy the waters?
Sure, he’d have bigger fish to fry should The Bad Thing happen, but at some point he’d have to deal with all that stuff.
We often think of preparing for death along the lines of wills and insurance policies and so on, but there’s an aspect to death that’s easy to forget about – digital death. Some of that I’ve covered in this essay here (Death in the Digital Age), and there’s a bunch of messy things that are getting messier in the subscription age – but if you’re a tinkering IT worker there are probably a whole bunch of things in your home IT setup that are going to be utterly perplexing for your partner to resolve if you don’t document. And I don’t mean document like an actual formal IT document, I mean document like “Imagine your partner has to undo all this crap”.
It all comes back to documentation. Preparedness. The same as any good backup environment being all about the planning, so too is the consideration, “What happens if I’m suddenly not here?”
I found myself irked about the prospect of my own mortality but at least could take comfort in insurance plans we had in place. But I couldn’t take comfort in what a mess the home IT would be for my husband to deal with at some point in the future. That was a serious lack of preparation on my part and, quite frankly, unbecoming of me as an IT professional who has worked his entire adult life in data protection.
Time to clean up my act.
Two important side notes:
- Ballarat hospital emergency ward/short term stay ward staff are stellar. While I wish I hadn’t had to meet them, I’m very glad I met them.
- Full kudos to the medical team for their IT security protocols. I was in a bed facing a number of computers in emergency, and then the main nursing station in the short-stay ward, and every time someone got up from a computer they immediately locked it. I love seeing that base security awareness.
Bonus side notes:
- There are elements of the Apple Watch UX that regularly irk me. I will bite my tongue in gratitude for at least several months.
- While there are times the Australian public health system annoys me, this week reminded me I’m bloody grateful for it compared to what we see in some other countries.