Sarah was proud of her terrible taste in television. She would have been so excited about the new reality show, Grease: You’re The One That I Want. She loved to watch The Real World and The Bachelor, and she adored figure skating. But her absolute favorite was the Winter Olympics.

During her battle with cancer, she was on some major painkillers. I hated having them in the house, but they kept her comfortable. She was drowsy a lot of the time, and she enjoyed her long naps in the sun every afternoon, but when February rolled around, she asked the Pain and Palliative Care team to see if they could come up with a mix that would let her be a little more alert, so she could watch the Winter Olympics. They came through with flying colors, and she curled up happily on the couch with the TiVo remote and a huge pile of fleece blankets.

Now, the TiVo notices what you watch, and it tries to guess your taste. If there’s room on its disk after it records the stuff you’ve asked for, it also records other things it thinks you might like. You can tune its profile by giving different shows “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” ratings.

After she died, it was a long while before I thought of watching TV. When I finally turned on the TiVo, I could hear Sarah laughing at me. The damn thing was completely filled with forty hours of women’s golf, professional wrestling, and bull-riding competitions, none of which she would have watched if you paid her.

I couldn’t convince it to stop, either. I asked it to record the new Doctor Who series and it told me that Doctor Who would conflict with the LPGA Tour. I ended up having to reset it to factory defaults.

The moral of the story is, they should make a new warning label for heavy-duty opiates: do not attempt to train your TiVo while using this medication.

Although it’s even funnier if she did it on purpose.