The file server sits on my shelf, a little black box. I should wipe it and put it to use, but I haven't gotten to it yet. It's too much like murder.

The server holds a pair of hard drives. The drives were set to copy each other, in a process called mirroring, so that if one drive failed, the other would still retain the data. Redundancy, for extra safety. 

I built the server, as well as a desktop computer, six years ago for my client and friend, Anne, and her husband, Jeff. Anne was the president of a fan club for a famous musician, and she wanted the most reliable computer possible. I wrought as well as I could for her, and set up mirrored drives in the desktop computer and also in the file server. Redundancy was important to her, for she was starting to have a memory problem, one from which her father had died at an early age.

I remember once watching her log in to her email account, and I saw her bewildered look as she forgot her usual password, and the flowing tears as she started to panic, repeating "This can't be happening." There was little I could say.

About three years ago, I stopped getting calls from her. But Jeff called me a month ago to assist him in another matter. Anne was still alive, but would not need my help again. She was in a nursing home, unable to care for herself.

When someone you love suddenly dies, you are struck with the loss all at once in one dark blow. They leave a hole, a cold spot that used to be warm, and you are shattered, unable to accept the truth. You can recover from this and build a different sort of life without that person, given time. 

But when they go slowly, bit by bit, and you watch them slipping away, holding them and sharing their grief and terror, hoping and praying for a cure that isn't coming, it's a special kind of hell. Eventually, they still look the same on the outside, and you still have the ghost of your love for them inside you, even as you look into their eyes that aren't windows to a person's soul anymore, animal eyes that can't show love for you, that can't even acknowledge that you exist.

When I saw Jeff again, he was glad to see me, but he'd aged more than the years should have taken from him. I held my grief inside me so as not to rasp the wounds raw for him again, and did my work as quickly and professionally as I could.

I was there to help him remove the reminders from his life. I copied Anne's data and music to Jeff's new computer, set up a new backup system, and he gave me the old hardware to take home.

So I have the old file server, a little black box on a shelf. It's my ethical responsibility to destroy unauthorized copies of my client's data, and I could put that file server to use. But there it still sits. It contains an echo, part of the record of her life, the things she loved and fought for, her accomplishments and her tears, the memories that made her happy.

It's not a life I can live for her. I have my own, and we all only get one. I won't spend mine in listening to her music and reading her words and trying to rebuild part of her soul in my own mind. But I still haven't wiped her data from the file server.

There's that nasty fact we don't want to face: we're redundant, too. We often take pride in individuality, and cherish being unique, but the truth is that there are more than enough humans to continue the civilized world, and that's what really matters in the long run. We are always passing the torch and there is always someone there to take it. If Anne had been a fan of a different musician, would it really have made a difference? Will it make a difference to anyone a hundred years from now? Do you care what music your great grandmother liked? Does it matter now what made her smile, or weep, when billions more can feel just the same?

Anne doesn't care about any of this, now. She has lost the ability. I still do care, for what it's worth. 

Redundancy.