My Deceased Husband’s Laptop — I Fixed It Myself!

My deceased husband’s laptop froze on me the other day.

I fixed it myself.

Jon’s laptop had become my favorite laptop in the months following his death. I use it all the time now. I keep it handy on the dining table where there’s a reassuring view out the window of our cypress tree and its graceful, mossy limbs.

My own laptop lives downstairs in my writing room with a view from my desk of a battered redwood fence and the occasional squirrel. I pay that laptop a visit whenever I’ve got serious work to do. This post, for instance.

Jon’s laptop, the fun one, is the one I turn to for writing chatty emails to friends. During the QE II coverage, I used it to look up how old I was on the day Elizabeth was crowned — I was ten.

The Fun Laptop

My deceased husband’s laptop was the fun laptop — until it wasn’t, which was when the password Jon had concocted quit working.

It was a charming, very Jon password. It was simple, and I suspect that Jon was too trusting to bother to change it on a regular basis.

Jon was like that. My husband had a — to me — perilously trusting disposition. When I first knew him, for example, he never locked his car. It was a dinged-up, faded blue Toyota and he figured nobody would bother it.

And nobody did. Until the night a man with no place to sleep crawled into the backseat for a nap.

The occasion was a restaurant dinner in San Francisco with Jon’s father, Scott. The three of us had left the car on a street on Russian Hill and walked down to the restaurant. When we returned I opened the back door to find a grimy man sprawled out on the backseat — where I was planning to sit.

I took the back seat that night so Jon’s father could sit up front. Scott needed the front seat because he was missing most of one leg and he needed the extra space for his prosthesis.

The leg had been amputated back in my father-in-law’s younger, more intemperate days. Scott had grown impatient with a horse during a trip to Mexico. He kicked the horse, as the story goes. The horse kicked him back, an infection ensued, and — this was in the days before penicillin — the leg had to go.

Which is why I was the one who first spotted the grimy man in the backseat of Jon’s Toyota.

I was startled at the sight of him. I was angry.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Get out of this car right now!”

I was outraged. Jon and his father were not.

“Are you OK?” Jon said.

“Can we help you?” said Scott. “Can we give you a ride somewhere?”

“What? Are you kidding?” I did not say this out loud, but I did think it. “Give this guy a ride? With me sitting in the backseat next to him?”

I was the sole church-goer in this group, the only card-carrying Christian. The two Newhall men were not believers. Definitely not.

Jon was an agnostic, I knew. Scott was probably a full-on atheist. But that’s just my best guess at the man’s inner workings. Over the many years I knew him, I never heard Scott take the God vs. no-God question seriously enough to be drawn into a conversation about it.

So I can’t say for sure that the word atheist applied to Scott. But I can say for sure that of the three people contemplating the grimy guy in the backseat of Jon’s Toyota, I was the only one claiming to be a Christian, the only one who’d signed on to Jesus’s admonition, “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.”

Churchgoer though I occasionally was, I was the crabbiest of the lot that night.

But soon the grimy man woke up and obliged us. He slid past me out of Jon’s car and headed downhill toward North Beach.

The Dear Password That Didn’t Work

Back to the story of Jon’s laptop and the password that didn’t work any more. It was a dear password actually. I loved Jon every time I tapped it onto his keyboard. But then, one day last week, the sweet password worked no more and I was frozen out of the fun laptop.

This could be serious, I thought. Had Jon and I been hacked? I tried the old password again and again, until finally a weird message popped up.

What’s a Lock Screen?

Something about Microsoft and a lock screen. What the heck was a lock screen?

I had covid brain last week. Brain fuzz. I didn’t know what a lock screen was and I didn’t want to find out. I pushed Jon’s laptop to the other side of the dining room table and left it till my brain could reassemble itself.

It used to be that Jon would come to my rescue whenever my computer quit on me. Jon loved it when my computer quit on me. He loved a good glitch, bug or failure to reboot. He loved troubleshooting computers the same way he loved crossword puzzles and Sudokus.

Personally, I don’t mind a friendly Monday morning crossword. But Sudoku? Working one of those is like figuring out what was wrong with Jon’s laptop — too hard on the brain.

How I Fixed My Deceased Husband’s Laptop

And so, earlier this week, when my brain fog lifted for a spell, I knew the moment had arrived to address this mysterious lock screen thing.

Where to start?

Start by staying calm.

Tell myself I’m smart.

Pull up Google.

Type in “what is a lock screen?”

Find out that it’s simple — the lock screen is the screen that appears when you power up your laptop.

Click a few more times.

Discover that the dear password Jon chose when he was still walking around on the planet concocting passwords was way too simple. It needed more complexity — numbers, symbols, upper case letters.

It needed to be less charming and more password-like. It needed to be gobbledygook.

Sweet Gobbledygook

I concocted a new password, a sweet, gobbledygook message I could send into cyberspace and back to Jon, wherever he was.

Where was Jon anyway?

Did he wind up in troubleshooting heaven?

Did the grimy guy give him a ride?

Note: Computers have a long history at our house. In 1987, it was an Apple desktop, an 8086 microprocessor and a Macintosh all crammed into the far end of our 3-year-old’s bedroom: 

Mom With Kids — The Home Office Blues