Update: The phone is disconnected but the texts are still in there. Can I go through and screenshot all of them a month from now; six months from now? I don’t know. Maybe someone will come forward with a technique to dump the texts directly into a computer. Wouldn’t that be nice!
Comments are open!
I have Zach’s phone. Zach’s phone has a lot of texts on it. I’ve kept it active – at no small expense to Noah, ultimately, since it comes out of the account that is now his – because I wanted to keep all those texts just as I am keeping all of Zach’s journal files.
Unfortunately, Apple’s security is such that I have been unable to get Zach’s AppleID password. This would allow me to download a text to email app. I’ve been reduced to taking screenshots one screen at a time and then putting them in a special foder that I was able to share and then access on my own ipad. Actually, I’m not sure this is really it because it’s been a couple of months since I did that. I lost heart when I came up to Zach’s text correspondence with Micah & Jake going back two years. I kept going back and more texts kept getting loaded.
Some of it is banal. Arguably, none of it was meant to be remembered but I have it and I want to be able to access it without paying $75/month to keep Zach’s phone active.
Now I also have Zach’s ipad. I can use it to access Zach’s email but not his texts, as far as I know. If anyone reads this and knows how to easily get texts off of an Apple phone, please get in touch with me.
If you think I am nuts and should just let it go, you can tell me that too. Comments are open.
For a while the 14th of each month was a major anniversary for me. I thought about Zach every day but on the anniversary I wanted others to think of him too. At first it was posts on FaceBook: for those first two months, FaceBook was fantastic. We were able to disseminate information about events and other news and many people responded in a very supportive way.
Months three through five I remember posting on the 14th about issues related to Zach’s death that I thought people should be reminded of. One month I talked about bad driving practices. The driver who killed Zach was not drunk; he was just driving too fast and probably distracted. Sad to say, we all do that, so let’s all try to do less of it. Etc.
So last month I was thinking about a post but I didn’t feel preachy and I had no news I wanted to share so I skipped it. This month I have my shiny new blog!
I’m not going to say anything more, preachy or otherwise. I’m just noting that the really sharp pain that had characterized the 14th of each month has subsided into the general pain. And this blog is my long term response to that.
I got a haircut yesterday.
Why is this news? Because it’s only the second haircut I’ve gotten since Zach was killed. That’s seven months for those of you scoring at home. And in the 25 or 30 years previous to this one, every two months was the rule for haircuts. A flexible rule, to be sure, but the common assumption was that short hair was easier to care for and I just didn’t want to be bothered.
True enough but things are different now. Indeed, it was in talking to Sarah just last week that I finally was able to articulate why I wanted my hair longer now. Sarah seemed particularly scandalized when she first saw me with it long. It took me a while before I realized that she had never seen me with long hair. She’s 31 years old.
Anyway, it seemed weird to me that I would commemorate Zach by growing my hair long. Zach always had his hair neatly trimmed – what’s the deal?
I told Sarah that I wanted people to know that I was different now. And that made sense to me. So that’s what it is.
Are people looking at me and thinking about that? Maybe, but most likely not, although a few who read this might start to. Whatever. It’s just for me. Several people have commented that I look nicer with longer hair. OK, but that’s not why I started to let it go. It was to mark the discontinuity in my life.
When I started this whole thing through WordPress, they suggested I use .com for my website domain. I was surprised to find thezachproject.com was taken so rather than have .org or .net, I thought .us would work best. I’m sure it’s meant to represent the United States, but I prefer to think that it indicates a spirit of inclusiveness.
I wouldn’t mind if this becomes a place where those of us who loved Zach can remember him & carry on in his spirit to do great things. As Clark Ewing said, ‘Let’s pick up the slack for Zach!’
(BTW, I went to thezachproject.com & found no web site there so I guess someone bought the name and never published anything. I’m already used to the .us, though.)
I don’t know who first started calling Zach by the nickname ‘Z’ – it was probably a Ewing, as they are much better at nicknames than the Woods – but it became one I really liked. As Zach moved through middle school & into high school, none of his friends used it while the family, especially his mother and me, used it often, usually in an affectionate way. It was our family nickname for him & no one else used it.
I believe it was at Thanksgiving in Santa Clara, where the Woods traditionally gathered, in the days after Zach’s death that my sister Mary showed up with a ‘Z’ that looked like one of those European country designators: a letter or letters, black on white, within an oval stuck to the back of your car. Mary had gotten a few of these Z’s printed on magnetic paper and she suggested that we put them on our cars to remember Zach.
Here it is:
I thought it was a great idea and put one on my car immediately. Unfortunately, the magnetism on the paper was not enough to withstand the rigors of modern driving and the Z soon fell off. I scoured the local craft shops for better magnetic paper without success. Mary’s original Z’s were rather large, as befits a sign on a car. Once I realized that smaller ones could be just as effective with easily obtainable magnetic paper, I took to my trusty InDesign to make more of them. I made two sizes and put them in the thank you notes I wrote and gave to friends, suggesting that they put them on their refrigerators, or other metal surfaces in their homes to commemorate Zach. I’ve put several in inconspicuous spots backstage at Davies Hall & they never fail to give my heart a little flutter when I see them.
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog will notice that the header of this page features a ‘Z’.
Here are links to the two sizes if anyone cares to make their own: