The longest drive home

Content warning: grief, and the sudden death of a family member

A few years ago, back when I still wore the network hat, I was running a core network replacement for a very large company. It was the middle of the pandemic, so the datacenter was mine alone, midnight to four in the morning, the only window I had to take the network down and stand a new one up in its place. I had a third party on a call in case I got stuck, but the network was down and they had no access to any of it. They were a voice, moral support, someone to confirm an answer. The work itself was mine.

It was running longer than it should have. Parts of the old config wouldn’t take on the new switch, so I was rewriting the vendor’s script on the fly to make them fit, with the whole network down around me. Somewhere in the middle of that, around three in the morning, my phone rang. It was my mom. You already know where my head went the second I saw her name.

My grandmother had passed in the night. I called her Nana. The last of my grandparents, gone, found in her apartment not long before the call. I was standing in a cold room full of machines, holding that, with a very large company dark behind me and the work only half done.

I tried to tell them what had happened, but I couldn’t get the words out. I’m pretty sure I was in shock. What came out was a jumble. A datacenter is a wall of noise on top of that, so all they caught was something about my mom phoning. They couldn’t make it out, and there was no one to hand any of it to anyway. So I did the only thing the moment left me. I swallowed it and went back to the work.

I’m honestly not sure how I got through the next hour, except that I fell back on training. I was in an incident, and an incident is a thing I know how to run. The network was down, and the path forward was the same as it always is: bring it back up. So that is what the trained part of me did, while the rest of me was somewhere else entirely.

I finished the replacement as well as it could be finished, brought global operations back up, took care of the few small things left over, and walked out into what became the longest drive home of my life. The wall I’d held up in that room came down somewhere on that drive, once the work was safe and nothing was resting on me holding it together.

I don’t have a tidy lesson from that night, and I’m not sure it needs one. The closest I’ve got is something that sounds like a cliché until a night like that makes you mean it: keep the glass half full. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It doesn’t come find you, though. You have to look for it, and then move toward it, one small step at a time, until you’re out the other side. I finished the work because there was no other option, and I let myself grieve her once it was done, because that was the only order the night allowed.

You get through the hard nights. Each one is proof you can get through the next, even when it feels impossible.