The death of my father in 7 gigs

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I set my scanner for JPEGs with 70 percent compression, then assembled them into PDFs. Fast and cheap. I also took photos of various ephemera with my phone at God knows what resolution. Not all versions of all the poems would survive. But I would do my best to preserve the words themselves.

I started ripping the hell out of his folders. Unbinding, pulling, feeding batteries through the scanner and observing some originals that fall apart when they come out the other side. It felt good to be a bad librarian. A bit of destructive, drunken joy. (A large bottle of bourbon disappeared during two weeks of nightly scans.) oh dad! What are you going to say now? I put many duplicate manuscripts in the recycling bin, at first relishing the idea that this heavy, very heavy paper would disappear from my life, and then as I tossed the bag onto the sidewalk, well, at a loss.

But that was just the atoms. Dad also left a lot of little pieces. There was his daily poetry blog, which I parsed and parsed into a virtual book of thousands of pages. That was easy enough, a one-night job. He, too, wrote lightning poems for decades: a few lines several times a day, one file per thought, generating thousands of documents with names like POEM12A.WPD, inside hundreds of folders with names like COPYAAA.199. I loaded them into a database and threw away all the duplicates. I converted the rest to more modern and tractable LibreOffice files. That format would preserve all the tabs and spaces that were so important to my father. He was a devotee of the white space.

I had intended to organize the flash poems into one volume per year, but the timestamps were tricky after decades of moving files between computers. I loved my father, but not enough to undertake thousands of forensic poem investigations. So I did my filial duty through batch processing. I used all the wonderful tools at my disposal: text-chewing analysis code and Unix utilities galore; Pandoc, which can convert anything to text; SpaCy, a Python natural language library that can extract topics and tags (“New Haven”, “God”, “Korea”, “Shakespeare”, “Republican”, “Democrat”, “America”). I decided that my father would write two things: poems, which are less than 300 words, and longer works, which are longer. He let the computer sort out the rest.

My father’s last decade was one of relentless downsizing, from an apartment to assisted living to a nursing home, stripping away belongings, throwing away clothes and furniture. And at the end: Two boxes and a small green urn. The latest zip file. After parsing, processing, and batch processing his digital legacy, he came up with 7382 files and around 7 gigabytes.

Frank’s sum took two days and two nights to upload to the Internet Archive, at a rate of a few files per minute. I wonder what the universe will do with this packet of information. Who will care? Scholars of short works on the Korean War? Sociologists studying Irish childhood in the 1930s? I am sure that your words will be ingested, digested and excreted as chat by countless bots and search engines. Maybe they will be able to make sense of all the modernist images. At least it will have slowed them down a bit. Eventually we all end up in a folder somewhere, if we’re lucky. Frank belongs to the world now; I published the files under Creative Commons 0, no rights reserved. And I know you would have loved the file from him.

The two boxes have been made into one, taped together and placed in the attic. No one will care about that box but me, and one day my bad inner librarian may feel ready to throw it away. All of the digital files are also zipped into one place, partly because I don’t want her poems showing up every time I search for something on my computer. I’m heading to the funeral tomorrow, just me and my brother, and the green urn will also be filed on the ground. I’m glad this project is over, but I ended up hosting the job, guiding these last phases of compression. My father needed a lot of space, but now he takes up almost nothing. Almost. Death is a lossy process, but something always remains.