Letters to the Editor
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thinking about loss...
Pretend you're dealing with the aftermath of a divorce announcement -- something's been stolen/broken and in the aftermath repaired/recovered. Like a family, kinda. Your life on that box is gone, and it's ok to mourn. Time heals.
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It's not your fault
I went through something similar during the past year. My hard drive crashed, and I lost everything. Only I had never backed it up. And I was absolutely devastated.
The worst part was the lectures, the tsk tsk tsk from people who responded to my grief by lecturing me about the importance of backing up my data. Like I hadn't already learned that lesson in the worst possible way. Yet when I questioned my friends about their own computers, most admitted that they only backed up twice a year, or they only backed up certain things. If their computer crashed tomorrow, it would not be okay. Very few people back up everything, all the time.
But you did -- you bought an external hard drive, and you backed up your data. You did what something like 90% of Americans never do.
Some might say that you should have known to keep your back up hard drive in another building. But come on. Who does that? How many people seriously back up everything on their computers and then take the drive or disks to a secure location away from their homes??
Do not blame yourself for this. You did the right thing. You were prepared. You lost your data because an anonymous douchebag violated you, stole from you. The theif is the only person responsible here. It's his (or her) fault, not yours.
No matter what anyone says, there is nobody in America who would be just fine if their home were burglarized tomorrow. No matter how many precautions we take, nobody is prepared for that kind of violation. So please don't blame yourself.
And, man... I feel your pain. I still start to look for one of my old documents, and then I remember...
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There may be nothing to do but to let more time pass
My apartment building caught on fire one evening years ago, and fortunately, the fire was put out before it reached my apartment, and I lost nothing. Had it burned me out, I would have lost hundreds of books, some of them keepsakes from my late father and a grandfather, in addition to rare family photos, some of them 19th-century tintypes. I would have lost my computer, which contains a series of essays in letter form that I wrote 10 years ago on a topic of great interest to what eventually became a sizable group of readers, amounting to about 250 pages.
Had that happened, I'm sure I would have felt something like the way you feel. Had that or something like it happened as a result of theft or vandalism, I would have felt worse, because of the aspect of violation.
Unless you had gotten to a point of Zen-like detachment about the impermanence of things, by no means an easy thing to achieve, the feelings you describe are what would be expected of just about anyone. You ask how you can reconceptualize the experience, but after all, you've already tried--by imagining victims of natural disaster and by alternately attempting a Zen approach and a New Age approach. If you had to go to New Orleans right now and teach in a disadvantaged school where they were lucky to have a computer at all, you might find yourself caring about your lost one less--or, you might find yourself feeling frustrated all over again, thinking about how you would gladly have enlisted your lost laptop in the service of educating your students.
Sooner or later, you won't see the same black cloud that you see now. Even years from now, something may remind you of the event and the specific memory may be just as galling, but other things will temper it. It would be nice if that could happen sooner, but in some cases, there may be nothing to do but wait, and this may be one of them.
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As an artist...
I am sorry this happened to you. What you describe is a devestating loss and a violation. There is not much I can say to your loss, or where you are mentally at this time.
But, let me share this. I have thought for a long time now, that it is never the "result" or the "end", because there is no such thing. It is always the process. It is never the destination, it is always the journey. If it is the destination, you might as well blow your brains out now, because in the end we are all dead. You still have the latest version of your process, although you have lost all your previous versions and their records But what you have is really a valuable thing to posess.
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Its called off-site storage
As a practical matter, I have no sympathy for anyone who loses business documents, dissertation, and the like because their computer is stolen.
I run a small business. I know that if my main computer and backup unit were stolen/destroyed I would be in deep do-do. (As a side point, a business I know actually closed up shop after a lighning bolt hit the main junction box outside its office. The strike burned out every computer/server/piece of hardware it had. It had no off-site backup.)
So I do daily backups which I keep in the office and once a week I do a backup to a portable hard drive which is then taken off-site. And for some truly important files, I also do daily backups to a web-base storage service.
SJ
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Losing Things
First, I'm sorry that happened. It really sucks to be robbed. I've had it happen to me, and my feelings of safety and privacy were truly violated on many levels. It took quite awhile to move on from it.
So, yes, you'll need some time to move on, and you shouldn't really put a limit on it at this point. Just let yourself heal.
As to the laptop, I've lost large portions of my masters thesis in a computer crash. I've lost important papers that I can never get back. Man, it is no fun.
Just remember that all of that stuff you lost--the papers, the experiences, the novels, etc.--all of it came from you. And you are still here. So, while you may not be able to recreate all of those things that you lost, exactly as they were, you can create new papers and new novels and new photos of friends because you still have you. Heck, have a "New Photo Party." Invite all your friends and take tons of pictures. Have your friends take tons of pictures. Get your friends to give you copies of the photos from events you now have no photos for.
Oh, and for backing up, e-mail yourself all your papers and photos etc. That way, they are in the Internet ether for a very long time and can be retrieved fairly reliably.