[HN Gopher] A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
___________________________________________________________________
A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
Author : ZeWaka
Score : 495 points
Date : 2025-02-14 23:10 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meyerweb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meyerweb.com)
| afavour wrote:
| There isn't really anything to say.
| hn666 wrote:
| This is one of those moments where, thanks to the internet, you
| catch a glimpse of another persons world. It gives some
| perspective.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I'm worried this will come across as cavalier and non-serious,
| but your comment reminded me a lot of ... yes, a comedy skit:
| Bo Burnham's _White Woman 's Instagram_, in which he ostensibly
| makes fun of cliched social media content, only to completely
| whip you about by briefly interrupting the cheese with the
| character's heartfelt post about living with her mother's
| death, perhaps the reason she needs the escapism of her online
| identity. And after it all you realize he told her entire life
| story in a series of comedy vignettes. I'm not ashamed to say I
| watched it in the right sort of mood and it moved me to tears
| (having lost a parent).
| Trasmatta wrote:
| The entire _Inside_ special is so deeply moving AND
| hilarious.
|
| _Welcome to the Internet_ is more applicable now than ever
|
| _That Funny Feeling_ is like a millennial version of _We
| Didn 't Start the Fire_ (and I have to be careful when I
| listen to it, because "that funny feeling" is difficult to
| cope with some times)
|
| _All Eyes on Me_ shook me to the core when I first heard it
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| I'm sometimes stressed about something stupid and come here out
| of muscle memory; just trying to fill my brain with another
| thing for at least a few minutes. Every now and again there's a
| post like this one that reminds me the thing I was trying to
| avoid is actually a problem someone else might be happy to
| trade with me. It usually makes me turn back toward my own
| problems with a little more gratitude.
| Syonyk wrote:
| And this is why I hate AI so strongly (I... debated several
| less charitable wordings of this opening).
|
| I read, because I want to know what _people_ think. What people
| _thought,_ decades, centuries ago. Writing, and reading, are
| about the only mechanism we know to really get _inside_ someone
| else 's brain. To see how, and what, they think, in what
| they've chosen to communicate. I used to write more for a
| technical audience - I've got a blog, it's got 9 years of
| content, a lot of words. Lately, I've been writing more for
| myself, but also expecting that, at some point, I'll share some
| of this with other people. I've read things I wrote months
| back, and I'd forgotten a lot of what I put in there. It's a
| time machine, to see myself as I was last summer.
|
| Or, a time machine, to understand someone's thinking in the
| early 1900s. Or older. We have writings that are _thousands_ of
| years old. The grief of loss is something that 's as old as
| human history, and there's no shortage of older writings on the
| matter - Psalms has no shortage of things to say.
|
| I don't _want_ to read "Machine, please generate me a chunk of
| text as would be written by someone who lost their daughter ten
| years ago, when they were turning six." There's no human behind
| it. I'm sure you'd get something that pulled the proper
| strings, but it would be _empty._ It would be _hollow._ Because
| there is no human behind it, with their own sufferings, dreams,
| hopes, grief. I 'm sure it would be polished and bland and SEO
| optimized, but it wouldn't be _real._
|
| But, hey, maybe someone could make a buck off generating it!
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Just wait until AI can feel pain- you know it will happen
| eventually when they have physical sensors and enough
| compute.
| djeastm wrote:
| You're right. The sad thing to me is there's not going to be
| much of a way to tell if the text we're reading, the picture
| we're looking at, or the person we're talking to even IS a
| real person unless they're physically in front of us.
|
| It's a huge loss for interpersonal connectivity at a distance
| nullc wrote:
| but AI is telling you what 'people' think-- not a person--
| but a blended up mismash of people, like the move Dark City,
| then strapped into a torture chair to diminish wrongthought.
| But it's people. or peopleish. It was made by people at
| least. sorta.
|
| Besides, after being filtered through perception and
| narration who is to say any story you hear from another
| person is _real_?
|
| Shouldn't it be more a question of what it does for you? And
| if some amorphous nonphysical branding of Realness(tm) and
| Authenticity(tm) is what you value most, then ultimately
| someone is marketing to that. And paradoxically it means that
| the most "real" stuff won't tend to be real at all.
|
| So I think ultimately the only thing real is going to be the
| stuff you experienced yourself or comes from acquaintances
| you know well enough to know when they're not being earnest.
| I hope won't be so bad, after all it was the condition of all
| humanity until not so many years ago.
| Syonyk wrote:
| There's a reason the phrase, "Designed by committee", is
| not a praise. It applies to AI, too.
|
| I don't want a mash-up of generic human thought, as
| filtered through a machine. I want to hear what _people
| think,_ as individuals.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| Context: This is remembering his daughter, Rebecca. (2008-2014)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer#:~:text=In%20201...
| ZeWaka wrote:
| I came across the new CSS logo and thought the color looked
| about right (it's rebeccapurple), and ended up reading Eric's
| blog as a result.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Eric Meyer's blog post about why it should be called
| 'rebeccapurple' - see
| https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/19/rebeccapurple/
| knome wrote:
| >For almost twelve hours, she was six
|
| This is an incredibly poetic, heartbreaking statement.
| wut-wut wrote:
| Devastating and beautiful
| canucker2016 wrote:
| a late tl;dr (more background for the above quote):
| "...A couple of weeks before she died, Rebecca informed
| us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old,
| and Becca was a baby name. Once she turned six, she
| wanted everyone (not just me) to call her Rebecca, not
| Becca."
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Eric Meyer's blog posts about his daughter Rebecca - see
| https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/rebecca...
| hifikuno wrote:
| Man, there is no way I can read this. I got choked up just
| reading the titles of the blog posts, knowing what was
| coming.
|
| I remember being younger and not being emotionally bothered
| by anything. Yet as I get older I am able to relate to so
| much more and everything hits so much harder because of it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I made the mistake of reading it with my baby kid sleeping
| in the next room. I am not normally religious, but I'm
| probably going to say at least a few prayers before bed
| tonight.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Here's one blog post that doesn't need a trigger warning,
| unless you need to be warned about cutesy stuff.
|
| see https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/05/05/three-
| interlud...
|
| Many of the blog posts from aug 2013 and later are
| heartbreaking.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| I made the mistake of reading this.
|
| My son is in remission from cancer (Leukemia, in chemo from 3
| to 6 years old, now 7).
|
| It's going to be a rough night.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| My daughter is in remission from leukemia and was in chemo
| from 3 to 5. If it was all-b then I wouldn't worry much.
| Yes, you'll have some dark thoughts along the way. I still
| do at times. But they'll fade away as your son goes on to
| lead a pretty normal life. My daughter is 10 now with
| passions for MMA and horse riding which took a pause
| because a horse stomped on her toe this past summer pulling
| out a nail. Was an accident and we treated it like one.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Yup, B-all.
|
| He hit all the goals so I know the relapse chances are
| vanishingly small.
|
| Doesn't change my anxiety though.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Stay strong my friend. The world is more beautiful with
| your son here, and I hope it stays beautiful for a very
| long time.
| lemonberry wrote:
| I was a young (19/20) bartender in the mid to late 90s. One
| afternoon I worked a private event. There was a couple there that
| had been staring at me. Eventually they came over and apologized.
| They said I looked like their son and that he'd be about my age
| that time. I forget how old he was when he passed. But I'll never
| forget the pain their faces.
|
| Some good friends lost their son at 10 months old. He'd be 11
| this year. It changed both of them. They've done amazing things
| since then, but you can see the weight on their faces.
|
| I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone.
| hinkley wrote:
| I lost a dog at 3 and a half years almost to the day to a
| congenital defect, that we didn't know about until he was
| already very sick. I'm a guy who will cross a street to meet
| someone's dog. For over a year afterward I would cross the
| street to _avoid_ walking past the same breed and color of dog.
| The way people avoid pitbulls.
|
| And that was just a dog. I can't even imagine what happens when
| your child dies, especially if your job or social circle
| involves them.
|
| The author said he has a therapist, but I wonder if he's had
| one the whole time or if he failed to process at the time and
| is now paying for letting it sink into his bones.
| lemonberry wrote:
| He's been writing about Rebecca and his family's journey
| since pretty early in her diagnosis if I remember correctly.
| I remember when he posted about her passing too.
|
| Grief comes in waves. Long after you think the storm has
| passed. We all process it differently. A 16th birthday is
| pretty big milestone in the states. I imagine that can be a
| magnifying glass for grief and pain. I know my friends feel
| the weight of their son's birthday and the date of his
| passing quite heavily.
|
| I lost my mom 16 years ago. To this day something can remind
| of her and it's like time stops. It's dizzying as the world
| around me moves on. Then I catch up again until the next
| wave.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > I lost a dog at 3 and a half years almost to the day to a
| congenital defect, that we didn't know about until he was
| already very sick. I'm a guy who will cross a street to meet
| someone's dog. For over a year afterward I would cross the
| street to avoid walking past the same breed and color of dog.
| The way people avoid pitbulls.
|
| > And that was just a dog.
|
| Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog can
| rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the bond
| between person and dog is reinforced through daily
| activities.
|
| I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss. Some losses may
| be painful longer than others, for sure, but the pain of
| losing a being you love is universal.
|
| A friend of mine described the pain of this type of loss
| thusly; Think of the pain like a ball
| bouncing around in a box, with a button at center-
| bottom which activates pain every time it is touched by
| the ball. At first, the ball is almost the same
| size as the box and hits the button constantly.
| Over time, the ball shrinks but the size of the box and
| the button remain the same. All that changes is how
| often the button is hit.
|
| HTH
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't want to diminish anyone else's experience but my
| neutered dog did not miss out on growing up and starting a
| life of his own. Pursuing a career, falling in love, having
| a child.
|
| At three a dog has had many of the milestones he will have
| in life. What I miss is the time I and my circle lost with
| him. Not the experiences he didn't get to have, or the new
| people he might have brought into the world, and their
| experiences. I would have shown him more of the same life
| in minor variations, not things I wouldn't even dream of
| doing myself.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| I did not interpret your post as diminishing anyone.
|
| The main point I wanted to share is that loss has a
| commonality in it always precedes pain and must be dealt
| with similarly. Comparing its form was never my intent
| nor do I hold there is any fundamental difference between
| them.
|
| That's just my opinion though.
| fipar wrote:
| > Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog
| can rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the
| bond between person and dog is reinforced through daily
| activities. I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss.
| Some losses may be painful longer than others, for sure,
| but the pain of losing a being you love is universal.
|
| This is beautifully illustrated by this line from Leonard
| Cohen's "Everybody knows":
|
| "Everybody got this broken feeling Like their father or
| their dog just died"
|
| As someone who has lost both a parent and a dog, I can
| relate completely to this.
| ignoramous wrote:
| It was relatively common for parents to lose children (every
| second child was _expected_ to die before 5y) but even then,
| with all that death around them, the tragedy remained as
| great as today. Back then, most did look to their God for
| solace, though: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/commen
| ts/1goyaco/when...
|
| In the present, orthodox practitioners of Abrahamic
| religions, in particular, may stoically overcome such
| profound grief by attributing it to _divine will_.
| Archelaos wrote:
| You sound like one of the friends of Job.
| Syonyk wrote:
| How so? They're neither questioning God's justice, nor
| asserting that the loss of children must be due to
| sin/unrighteousness/etc.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That reminds me the story of Mozart's parents. Their first
| 3 children died less than 1 year old. I can't imagine the
| despair. Out of 7 children, only 2 survived infancy.
| red_admiral wrote:
| > And that was just a dog.
|
| I forget which book I read this in, but the author in their
| autobiography described their "real man" father as someone
| who they'd only seen cry three times in his life. When his
| wife died, he was all stoic about it and didn't show any
| upset in public. But when his favorite dog died, he broke
| down crying.
|
| Many people who don't understand how upset one can get over a
| dog, have never had one. I have a photo of our first family
| dog and it still makes me upset if I look at it for too long.
| nly wrote:
| Well humans are aware of their own mortality and can talk
| about it with one another. Your man can find peace because
| he would know his wifes outlook on life and her wishes
|
| We are entirely responsible for the health and welfare of
| domestic dogs, like young children.
| darkwater wrote:
| I will be downvoted but that ("real man", no crying for the
| wife passing away...) tells more about subtle "machismo"
| and patriarchy that about how much people can care about
| dogs.
| luluthefirst wrote:
| Grief is complex and deeply personal, and is not about
| fitting someone else's expectations... Losing a dog hits
| different because their presence is so genuine and
| uncomplicated. They provide unconditional comfort. That
| connection is usually way less complicated than the ones
| with have with people.
| darkwater wrote:
| Let's add conformity to (wrong? IMO totally)
| social/religious rules like "you cannot divorce". Because
| if your spouse passes away, either young or when it was
| their time so to speak, and you aren't genuinely sad,
| well, why were you two still together? If you spent a
| happy life together with someone, you should be sad even
| if they passed away serenely, because hey, it was the
| person with whom you shared and lived almost everything.
| If instead you were still together but actually secretly
| hating each other, or just because "it was always like
| that", well, the marriage should have not lasted til that
| point. If it did, it was most probably due to social
| rules to follow no matter what and/or patriarchy. And if
| it was a young person, well, even more! A young loss
| should generate even more grief. And the "real man"
| part...well, I think it explains itself.
|
| I understand this can come off as simplifying too much
| but I believe it boils down to those reasons in the vast
| majority of cases. So, there can be exceptions of course
| but they are a minority.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| A bit daft, but my dad died when I was 6 and I had (and
| probably still have) a lot of issues expressing grief at
| the time.
|
| I absolutely lost it when a pet goldfish died ~5 years
| later. This kind of stuff can come up at the weirdest time.
| svieira wrote:
| What I have found is that each new grief brings all the
| others with it. Morning the new sorrow is tied up with
| morning the old sorrows.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Hmm, I've not really found that to be the case
| personally. Past that initial shit period up until my
| late teens, subsequent losses and grief has been quite
| different.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| My best friend's son died at the hands of a negligent daycare,
| he escaped his crib, knocked a stroller over on to himself
| which wasn't supposed to be there, and suffocated to death. My
| friend called me that night to tell me. It's been 5 years and I
| think about it every single day. Frankly it has turned me from
| a person with zero anxiety to one with a good deal. I've
| checked on my younger daughter's breathing every single night
| since then. She's 7 years old and I still can't stop myself
| from checking on her. My friend is one of the good-est people I
| know. A genuinely good person. Why him? And if him, certainly
| why not me?
| sho_hn wrote:
| I've had nothing like this happen, but somehow I get this--I
| was spooked by anecdotes about SIDS before having kids. When
| we had our daughter, and she was sleeping in her crib in our
| room, the first couple of months I'd basically wake up when
| she _wasn 't_ making noise, would then in dazed half-sleep
| wait for her to make any noise to confirm she was still alive
| (or check, sometimes), and could only then fall back asleep
| again. This only really quieted down one year in, when the
| statistical risk goes down. I guess it's fairly easy to get
| hypersensitized to dangers like this.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > My best friend's son died ... It's been 5 years and I think
| about it every single day.
|
| Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote
| possibilities. Most times, it does not.
|
| They exist, but cannot be predicted nor controlled.
| Hopefully, the following help quell anxiety resulting from
| considering all which _could_ happen. God,
| give me grace to accept with serenity the things that
| cannot be changed, Courage to change the things
| which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish
| the one from the other.[0]
|
| Or: Make the best use of what is in your
| power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things
| are up to us [eph' hemin] and some things are not up
| to us.[0]
|
| Or: If there's a remedy when trouble strikes,
| What reason is there for dejection? And if there is no
| help for it, What use is there in being glum?[0]
|
| HTH
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote
| possibilities. Most times, it does not._
|
| That's very true. And for a lot of people, and I'd guess HN
| has a very dense concentration of them, that's very _hard_
| to not do, because we 've been trained to do exactly that,
| for professional work.
|
| Cybersecurity is exactly that. What are _all_ the remote
| possibilities you can come up with, and how do you defend
| them? Then reality hits, and it 's so much worse than you
| ever feared, because you didn't think that Intel would
| release chips that couldn't keep secrets if you asked in
| the proper way. "I speculate, with my little gadget, the
| contents of all of physical memory..."
|
| What's SRE, ops, any of those fields, but trying to imagine
| the remote possibilities of how things go down, and how you
| can mitigate it, or at least fail cleanly? And then, of
| course, reality hits, and you end up with someone shutting
| down a datacenter edge router with a dial up modem, because
| they'd been sufficiently paranoid about things to insist
| that there would still be a POTS route in, for when
| _everything else went wrong_ and in-band signaling no
| longer worked. Which, of course, happened.
|
| The high reliability hardware sorts, I expect, deal with
| something similar. "But _what if_ a super high energy
| cosmic ray flipped this bit? "
|
| I don't know how to turn this off when it's not helpful.
| I've done it too long. :/
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| >> Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote
| possibilities. Most times, it does not.
|
| > ... for a lot of people, and I'd guess HN has a very
| dense concentration of them, that's very hard to not do,
| because we've been trained to do exactly that, for
| professional work.
|
| I can definitely relate. Working in various teams quite
| similar to what you describe, I'd say these examples are
| fine exemplars of the "sometimes it helps" category.
|
| Luckily, these are engineering related and not arbitrary
| familial threat vectors, real or imagined, as the latter
| are often (not always) not quantifiable to a
| statistically meaningful degree.
|
| > I don't know how to turn this off when it's not
| helpful. I've done it too long. :/
|
| Here again, I can definitely relate. :-)
| Syonyk wrote:
| I switched career paths in an attempt to get away from
| that.
|
| It turns out, it follows me. I have a decade worth of
| finely honed pessimism maximizer I _cannot get to stop
| running against everything._
| llm_trw wrote:
| Just remember than not a century ago the average family would
| bury half their kids.
| yard2010 wrote:
| You never look on the same river because each time you look
| there's different water flowing.
| TomK32 wrote:
| and even 100 years ago was so much better than 200 years ago
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-
| al...
|
| Let's hope the impact of RFK Jr on US health and vaccination
| of children won't be too big.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yes, exactly my thought. The graveyard in my dad's hometown
| has a huge section just for small kids, because life in the
| country was tough, and that was normal.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I remember once walking through a graveyard and seeing
| three names on a single headstone - three children,
| siblings who had all died on the same day. Below their
| names was a simple caption: "All gone".
|
| I have no idea what the story is or how those children
| died, but I think about that headstone all the time,
| especially now I have a child of my own. So much grief,
| pain and tragedy conveyed so succinctly. I'm clenching my
| gut right now just thinking about it as I type.
| macintux wrote:
| Tangential, and I am reluctant to share this in an
| important thread about loss and grief, but an occasional
| hobby of mine is finding an interesting headstone during
| my travels and researching the story.
|
| - https://opposite-lock.com/topic/28187/memorial-
| mysteries
|
| - https://opposite-lock.com/topic/4273/the-milhon-
| brothers-sub...
| djeastm wrote:
| I remember reading that the upper classes didn't even name
| their children until they were a few years old and had gotten
| past the crucial disease stage.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Why only the upper classes?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Theoden king expresses
| his grief to Gandalf, "one should not have to bury their
| children". I was in college then, unmarried and didn't
| appreciate the meaning of it or could appreciate his grief.
|
| Now that I have kids of my own I can't get myself to read the
| posts such as OPs. And if I end up reading it their grief stays
| when me for a long time. Exactly what they have written, all
| those years not spent, not lived, it's just too much to handle
| for me.
|
| I read somewhere that grief is unspent love. I only wish OP
| more courage and continued grace as the burden only gets
| heavier each day.
| Syonyk wrote:
| There are so many things that hit differently with age and
| stage of life.
|
| I really liked What Dreams May Come back in high school.
| Dante's Inferno, kind of, trip to Hell, Robin Williams,
| trippy paint scene.
|
| I watched it again as a married adult with children, and
| barely made it through intact. That movie, based around the
| sudden loss of both children without a chance to say goodbye,
| and then the sudden loss of a spouse, and the descent into a
| mental hell and cage of ones own making... I missed _all_ of
| that watching it in high school. I knew it was there, but it
| meant nothing, I 'd not experienced any of that. It was a
| _radically_ different movie to me, 20 years later. And I 've
| not watched it since.
| UberFly wrote:
| Great post here, and yea, things hit so much harder after
| kids. I remember seeing a photo of a man in India carrying
| his daughter killed by the tsunami. My daughter was about the
| same age and I cried for an hour in front of my computer.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Great post here, and yea, things hit so much harder
| after kids ... remember seeing a photo of a man in India
| carrying his daughter killed by the tsunami_
|
| Also from India, a bereaved mother is barely able to speak
| to the loss of her 2 children, right after having spoke
| about 6 other deaths in her family:
| https://youtu.be/XLl2qAprU8w?t=312
|
| I've seen that clip before, but after having kids, it
| _hits_ like a truck. That said, children or not, there 's
| no shortage of people who mock or deny or won't sympathise
| with "others" (outgroup).
| rezaprima wrote:
| Speaking of tsunami, I remember watching on TV a mother
| when was shown the bodies of both her husband and son.
| She was unable to show emotion at all. Just empty look
| and silence
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| > Grief = unspent love
|
| God thats poignant :( Glad you said that for me to keep tho
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Stories like this hit me harder after having children, too.
|
| But they also provoke thankfulness for all I have. For a
| little while after I read such tragic stories, I try to enjoy
| the everyday life a bit more, enjoy the presence of the loved
| ones.
|
| Memento mori.
| BlandDuck wrote:
| I agree entirely. I have two wonderful daughters, and
| stories like this hit hard.
|
| There is a fiction short-story called CHICXULUB By T.
| Coraghessan Boyle. It is one of the hardest hitting stories
| I have read as a parent. Still brings tears to my eyes.
| Recommended.
| zubairshaik wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, it was a harrowing read.
| I'll have to re-visit this in 10-15 years when I'm no
| longer a young bachelor.
|
| Here's a link for anyone else who wants to read it:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/01/chicxulub
| stuartd wrote:
| Archive link - http://archive.today/Ez5q6
| egeozcan wrote:
| Three months after my son was born, I made the mistake of
| following the news about the 2023 Turkey-Syria
| earthquakes[0], especially in the Hatay region. I thought I
| was tough, as I had lived through the chaos and death of a
| disaster before, in 1999[1]. This time, I was far away in
| Germany, so not actually where it happened. But no.
|
| Back then, as a teenager, I could somehow handle seeing
| people take their last breath on a sidewalk (don't get me
| wrong: It was absolutely horrible, but I could keep
| functioning, eat, sleep, even help people carry first aid
| kits). I remember being outside our building and asking my
| father where all those buildings went, in some of which my
| friends lived. He had chosen not to lie to me, and I still
| didn't break.
|
| But one photo from 2023, a child's grave with a toy
| helicopter on top, his name written on the toy, the same name
| as my son, completely broke me. Two years later, I still
| haven't recovered from that single image.
|
| And yet, today, we were in the emergency room because my son
| was struggling to breathe. I was calm and functioning. If I
| had seen something like this on the news or in a movie, I
| wouldn't have been able to keep watching.
|
| It's strange how the mind works.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkey%E2%80%93Syria_
| eart...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake
| plagiarist wrote:
| Sometimes it's easy to keep it together when you have to
| focus on something critical and hard to keep it together
| when you're safe and can drop your guard. Hope he's doing
| well.
| conductr wrote:
| Reading this, sitting next to my 6 year old son, my ears tear up
| and I'm reminded to cherish every moment. Truly saddened by these
| kinds of stories and just how quickly it could happen to any of
| us.
| tomatodevice wrote:
| Just thinking about it gives me very strong anxiety. I had to
| sit next to my daughter, she's sleeping and breathing.
| dbtc wrote:
| Perhaps it is no consolation at all, but grief is beautiful when
| expressed with grace like this.
|
| Also, I really like the design of this site.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| This is when I wish humans were not simulation machines. So much
| pain caused by that damn brain of ours.
| bitwize wrote:
| I was just thinking today of my friend Donny Miceli, who died of
| childhood leukemia at the age of 7. I wondered what it would be
| like to be Donny's mom or dad. There would be sadness of course,
| and the devastating feeling that something was missing that
| should be there. Would there be guilt? How could they carry on,
| knowing that there was a high school graduation, wedding, etc.
| that they should have attended but weren't? I don't recall if
| Donny had siblings but if he did, how would they have felt
| growing up without him?
| quanto wrote:
| From a Japanese song Kurumi
|
| If only time could wash everything away, Shi Jian gaHe mokamoXi
| iLian reQu tsutekurereba
|
| a life would be truly easy Sheng kiruShi haShi niRong Yi i
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I know how you feel. Tomorrow is my late son's ninth birthday.
| lemonberry wrote:
| So sorry for your loss.
| nyczomg wrote:
| My twins just turned 10 yesterday. But they were born as part
| of a triplet pregnancy... Life is just brutal, and I don't know
| if there is any solace in it being so brutal to so many other
| people. But I hope you're ok.
| edelwiess wrote:
| So sorry
| lijok wrote:
| Life's greatest, least rewarding challenge; continuing to live
| when a loved one cannot.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| To put that in context, when my grandparents were born, a
| typical family had around four children, and one in four
| children did not live to the age of five.
|
| It is sort of crazy to think of what it would be like to grow
| up in that world.
| croissants wrote:
| I think a modern USA 1 year old has about a 99.97% chance of
| making it to adulthood. That means that if a modern USA adult
| loses a young child, there's a decent chance they don't know
| _anybody_ who has had that experience.
|
| The ancient (and even, as you point out, very slightly pre-
| modern) world had a lot of "infrastructure" in place to deal
| with this, there were rituals and ceremonies and familiar
| people who knew what you were going through, and most of that
| is gone now.
|
| It is indeed an enormous change.
| Syonyk wrote:
| It's not gone. It's just less common, and, at least in my
| experience, hidden inside churches where people are open
| about this sort of thing, and where, in a lot of them,
| miscarriages are treated as much the same thing, to be
| grieved over, as loss. Sometimes in private, but it's
| better when it's shared, _because others have gone through
| the same thing, suffering silently._
|
| But you're right, it's far harder to go through an
| experience alone, and loss of a child has certainly become
| far, far less common than it used to be. At least, if you
| limit it to the born.
|
| In the US, in 2023, 1 in 3 never made it to birth.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| A few years ago I read of a pioneer woman in the Dakota
| region in the late 19th Century who had fifteen children, of
| whom 9 survived to adulthood. I can't begin to imagine the
| pain, and the fortitude needed to survive so much tragedy. As
| a parent, I can't think of anything worse than to lose one's
| child.
| deadbabe wrote:
| People say time heals all wounds but sometimes there's simply not
| enough time left to heal certain wounds.
| imchillyb wrote:
| Time cannot heal.
|
| Time is a tumbler, our feelings the rocks within.
|
| Feelings begin as jagged, cutting, things. Time smooths and
| polishes the the edges, highlights unseen aspects. Time gives
| us perspective and distance.
|
| No wound is ever fully healed. There remain scars and
| imperfections small pieces of us that never return to 'normal'
| again.
|
| Time is distance. How many miles the train will travel from the
| station. Distance grants perspective and removes immediacy.
|
| Time can't heal though. Time doesn't exist. We made it up in
| order to make more sense of our universe.
|
| There is only now.
| neogodless wrote:
| I started watching _Paradise_ , and a grieving parent said
| "time just keeps taking me further away from when I was with
| them."
| deadbabe wrote:
| I would just tell them it's also taking them closer to when
| they'll be reunited.
| enobrev wrote:
| I have such a deep appreciation for Eric sharing his grief and
| journey through it. I only know who Eric is because of his
| amazing contributions to nerdy things I've thought about and
| appreciated for more than half my life. But his writing about of
| his journey with his daughter had changed me long before I was a
| father. And now that I am, I can barely make it through reading
| this.
|
| Outside of the long term affects his family has had on my life,
| he reminds me that we used to write publicly, sometimes
| anonymously, for one another outside of social enclaves and
| directly affect one another without expectations of a like or
| subscribe or whatever makes the thing go brrrr.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Well this was an unexpectedly and horrendously heartbreaking
| story to find.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| The government should provide a fund for people who have
| experienced child loss so they never have to work again.
| kolanos wrote:
| Work might be the only distraction they have.
| dzink wrote:
| That would create a horrible perverse incentive to kill
| children for money.
| card_zero wrote:
| Or fake their death, and lavish attention (and cash) on them
| until a couple of decades later the government notices they
| exist, it would be an interesting demographic.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Oh you sweet innocent summer child. Never change you glorious
| sunray.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| I don't have any kids, but I think about those kids in Gaza a
| lot. Maybe it's cause it felt like I was so helpless. I called
| offices. every day. The news media rejects our grief. The actual
| government rejects our grief and pays into the depravity. If I
| feel like this what does one of those parents that survived feel?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| This is deeply moving.
|
| I have 3 kids. One is adopted, but he is no different from the
| others.
|
| If anything happened to any of them, I sincerely can't imagine
| how I'd carry on. I know I would, but I don't know what it would
| look like. I can't imagine that world because I so badly don't
| want it.
|
| Sometimes I force myself to imagine myself getting a terminal
| illness or injury, and think of how I'd handle that, how I need
| to live as though that could happen at any moment, and how
| important it is that I do that for my family. That's not so
| difficult. But when I come to the sort of mental simulation of my
| kids dying, I'm made sorely aware of how unprepared I'll be. As
| you can't easily prepare for their arrival, I don't think you can
| prepare for their departure.
|
| Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations something like "When you
| kiss your child, whisper to yourself: 'Tomorrow you may be
| dead.'", which sounds extremely morbid, but (especially in his
| time) is something we unfortunately do need to consider and
| contemplate. Not only for ourselves, but our entire families.
| Someone needs to be able to guide the family through that,
| somehow.
|
| I don't know how Eric met that challenge, but evidently he has
| (and continues to) and I admire anyone who does. That's an
| extremely hard path to be pushed down. To share pieces of that
| with other people is tremendously vulnerable and, in a sense,
| generous. I appreciate it.
| no-exist wrote:
| Last year during summers, I lost one of the pillars of my life to
| Cancer, my grandfather. The loss felt as extreme disturbance,
| sharp pain and regret about not being there for him, not
| fulfilling my responsibilities.
|
| I spent months feeling like a reason for this loss. The last few
| days of his life were painful, at least that's what I remember my
| parents telling me. He called out my name the night before he
| left, asking me to help him, I got to know. He wanted the pain to
| go away, a man who never asked for anything his whole life was
| crying for help. What still hurts is the thought that his pain
| was so unbearable that he gave up. He gave up his trust in
| himself, his family and me. I felt responsible for that. This
| image imprinted in my memory for so long. Every time, I thought
| of him, this is what came up.
|
| After months of cursing myself, I realised that he may still be
| alive. Not in the reality I am having these thoughts, but in some
| other reality. His reality where his consciousness stays. Where
| he observes and not necessarily me. And that's the reality he is
| alive in. I found solace in the realisation that people never
| die. If we consider all possible realities generated each moment
| based on the decisions made, then there'll be at least one
| reality where he stays alive. We extend this logic and infer that
| at each moment out of all the possibilities, at least in one the
| man stays alive.
|
| This even though not proven, gives a sense of relief and
| happiness. It is similar to blind faith, but the one that makes
| the most sense to me. And I am happy for my grandfather, that
| he's living his life, whichever reality he's in.
|
| I love you, dadaji. <3 And I miss you in this reality.
| blueplanet200 wrote:
| Not much on Hacker News has made me cry...
| wut-wut wrote:
| Facts
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Sometimes I think that if there is a hell, we're probably in it.
| The amount of suffering people can experience on Earth is
| unfathomable sometimes.
|
| I remember the most painful moments of my life, and thinking that
| it's absurd that the human brain can experience this level of
| suffering. It doesn't make sense. If we're lucky, we can get tiny
| drops of joy in life, but the depths of suffering feel
| bottomless.
| Syonyk wrote:
| There _is_ joy to be found. There can be peace, in this life,
| even walking through the worst of times. It 's found in Jesus,
| and the life-on-life community known as the Church.
|
| We've invented ways to turn down the volume knob on emotions.
| Anti-depressants, from what I've heard, achieve this (SSRIs?).
| My understanding, from people who've been on them, is that it
| turns everything into a muted greyscale. Nothing is very bad,
| nothing is very good, _meh._ But what is the human experience
| except the dynamic range of emotion, rightly felt? We have a
| perpetual recentering, and without sorrow, without grief, there
| can be no true joy, because they are in the contrast. Endless
| joy would just become normal.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > It's found in Jesus, and the life-on-life community known
| as the Church.
|
| Do you realize how incredibly dismissive it is for people to
| talk about the pain they feel, and to have someone respond
| "nah, you just haven't found Jesus yet"?
|
| I was raised in a deeply religious household. I found no
| peace in Jesus. I'm happy that Christianity works for you,
| but this is not globally applicable advice. It's also an
| example of spiritual bypassing.
| Syonyk wrote:
| You're free to share a more general answer, should you have
| one.
|
| And I'm free to share the answer I've found, even as I'm
| working through the challenges of life.
|
| I've no idea what "spiritual bypassing" even means.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I don't think there IS a general answer. That's the
| entire crux of the matter.
| ksenzee wrote:
| My brother in Christ--meant genuinely--this is not the way.
| Multiple posts on this thread preaching about Jesus and
| bringing up the unborn? Evangelism is not meant to be
| twisting people's grief into a sales pitch. When Jesus's
| friends wept, he wept with them.
|
| (Also, if an SSRI turns your world into grayscale, it's not
| the right drug for you. That's not how they're supposed to
| work. Very much the opposite, in fact.)
| Syonyk wrote:
| I certainly don't intend it as a sales pitch. I intend it
| as something _true._ Sorry, I 'm in a bit of a weird state
| tonight, chewing through a lot of Psalms, after having gone
| through Job, and the collection of prophets in the past few
| weeks, and life... is less stable than I'd prefer right
| now, with a lot of challenges. Happy to chat via email or
| Matrix, I'm not hard to find.
|
| As for SSRIs, I've not actually tried them, I'm just going
| based on what several people have told me, that they're
| like putting earplugs into your emotions.
|
| For the unborn, I don't see a point in ignoring reality. In
| 2023, the last year I've got convenient stats for, the US
| had ~3.5M births, and ~1M abortions. We're not "orders of
| magnitude" off the 1-in-2 stat from a century ago, we're...
| maybe a factor of 2 off. I see no point in pretending
| otherwise. And I do know more than a few people who have
| either lost young children, or lost preborn children.
| That's just my world. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
|
| Jesus wept with them, certainly, but also was rather clear
| on who He was.
| ksenzee wrote:
| > Jesus wept with them, certainly, but also was rather
| clear on who He was.
|
| I'm just saying John 11:32 is not immediately followed by
| John 11:40. There is a time for grief, and there is a
| time for evangelism.
|
| > And I do know more than a few people who have... lost
| preborn children.
|
| I've miscarried twice myself. A lot of women have.
| Sometimes it's grieving a child you never knew, but
| sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just a late period.
| Miscarriage is rarely the same depth of loss as
| stillbirth; it's almost never the wrenching, life-
| changing grief of losing a six-year-old. It feels
| honestly a bit grotesque even to make the comparison.
| MandieD wrote:
| And about one percent of the women around you have
| survived an ectopic pregnancy because we're still
| (mostly) a society that cares more about the life of a
| breathing, thinking person than of an embryo that was
| doomed from the moment it landed outside of the uterus.
|
| I'm part of that one percent. I regularly say a prayer of
| thanks for the doctors and nurses who (mostly
| metaphorically, but one physically) held my hand and
| explained what had gone wrong, how I could deal with it
| in a way that would preserve our chances to try again
| with as little risk to me as possible. I thank God that I
| was in a country with the resources and the legal
| apparatus for me to deal with my disappointment quickly
| and safely.
|
| And I'm thankful for the child who I was able to bear
| nearly a decade later.
|
| I don't judge anyone for the abortion they felt was the
| best of their hard options. I theoretically would have
| been left until I was bleeding out in many countries [0],
| and even my own home state doesn't quite feel safe now.
|
| [0] No, I wouldn't. I'm a well-off American woman who can
| fly to somewhere rational, and worst case, am good
| friends with several MDs.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| I am glad it helps you, but the amount of pain inflicted in
| the name of religion and gods in this world makes your
| assertion naive, to put it politely.
| MandieD wrote:
| As a fellow believer, I need you to understand that you are
| doing more than any hardcore, argumentative atheist to turn
| people away from Christ by posting like this.
| lemming wrote:
| I remember reading Eric's writing about Rebecca's illness and
| death at the time, and even though it was before my own
| daughter's birth I remember it being one of the saddest things I
| could remember reading. His writing is so eloquent that he really
| communicated the sadness and helplessness, while still managing
| to move on with his life. My deepest condolences.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The longer you carry the dead with you, the longer they cannot
| rest. Let them go. They would not want to see you suffer in their
| name.
| mainecoder wrote:
| easier said than done!
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| This blog is not for everyone.
|
| It is a journey into the mind of a man experiencing grief for the
| loss of his daughter.
|
| I wish that this man can find peace.
|
| In the end, the mortality rate of everyone alive is 100% and the
| best we have is celebrating being alive while it lasts.
| alejohausner wrote:
| This reminds me of Victor Hugo's famous poem, "Demain, des
| l'aube," about visiting his daughter.
| adamcblodgett wrote:
| A long time ago I saw Eric do a presentation at An Event Apart in
| Seattle on something like Designing for People in Crisis. He used
| his trip with his daughter Rebecca to the emergency room as the
| example of why it's crucial to have a section of your hospital
| webpage for people in crisis that is very easy to read and very
| easy to use in case of shock, trauma and emergency. Things like
| phone numbers and emergency room drop directions/maps.
|
| I was familiar with Eric's work at the time, but the
| vulnerability he showed in using his own tragedy as an example of
| why websites should be, essentially, accessible for people in
| various states of trauma and crisis was incredibly moving and
| made the case for accessible design in a personal, powerful way.
| cyrillite wrote:
| This would be a really good read if anything like it exists
| somewhere. Do you have notes, more to say, a direct link to
| relevant work, anything?
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| Live long enough, and a few things will happen;
|
| What you thought important as a child seems laughable as an
| adult.
|
| What you found painful never leaves you.
|
| What you lose can shackle you to what is no more, never to be
| resolved, by definition moments in the past which no longer exist
| and are forever out of reach. A decade ago, I
| said that I felt the weight of all the years she would
| never have, and that they might crush me. Over time, I have
| come to realize all the things she never saw or did adds to
| that weight. Even though it seems like it should be the
| same weight. Somehow, it isn't. I was talking about
| all of this with a therapist a few days ago, about the time
| and the losses and their accumulated weight. I said, "I
| don't know how to be okay when I failed my child in the
| most fundamental way possible." "You didn't fail her,"
| they said gently. "I know that," I replied. "But I
| don't feel it." A decade, it turns out, does not
| change that. I'm not sure now that any stretch of time
| ever could.
|
| As @imchillyb in this thread notes: Time is
| distance. How many miles the train will travel from the
| station. Distance grants perspective and removes immediacy.
|
| Here, this can only be true if we give ourself permission to
| "board the train", to free oneself from the shackles of loss, of
| guilt, of blame, to accept that time does not destroy the memory
| of where we were or who we were with.
| irjustin wrote:
| In Lord of The Rings, there's a scene - King Theoden buries his
| son and says to Gandalf, "No parent should have to bury their
| child."
|
| That stuck deeply with me and eventually I decided that if I lost
| my child, I'd let it consume me.
|
| I have no idea how it would destroy me, but it would - wholly. A
| decade would pass and I'd hardly notice. I have so many videos of
| my daughters and I would likely do nothing but replay them simply
| regretting that I didn't take more.
|
| I'd be the saddest person on earth and I think that's okay.
| lbres wrote:
| Having lost a child a few hours after birth I cannot imagine the
| pain that comes from raising a child and having them taken away.
| Losing my daughter was hard enough.
| jeanlou wrote:
| Thank you for sharing such a deep and hurtful part of your life.
| I'm sorry for your loss, I cannot imagine what it feels like.
| rizvanovic wrote:
| I'm lucky to have avoided loss to this level for almost thirty
| years. I can't even imagine what it feels like. Thank you for
| sharing this, I'll hug my dog and partner extra hard.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| When I read these stories, I occasionally try to imagine how it
| would feel for any of my children to be not there. I can never
| get too far, just the beginnings themselves are too powerful for
| me. It is like cracking open the doors to a horrible world and
| simply peeking through the tiny gap is enough pain. Unimaginable
| how bad it is for those for whom it is a reality of every waking
| moment for the rest of their lives.
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| I have the same feelings. When I start to wonder, I instantly
| have teary eyes and have to stop myself from thinking about it.
| I just can't. It must be hell.
| edelwiess wrote:
| We may all come from different cultures and generations but this
| loss hits deep in the same way for everyone. When I was a kid, I
| remember thinking my grandparents were very odd. They'd wake up
| everyday at 4 am. Grandpa would walk barefoot to the temple in
| their neighborhood and spend the next 2 hours singing to the
| deities there, gently waking each one up, washing and dressing
| them for the day. Grandma would send hand made goodies (food) as
| an offering with him.
|
| They both spoke very little through their life. Mostly smiled,
| never heard them say anything bad about anyone, indulge in any
| material pleasures. Though I got affection from them, there was
| also always a sense of detachment from both.
|
| As I grew up I learnt that they had lost their youngest son when
| he was 5 to a snake bite. They carried the burden of not
| protecting him for a decade while spiraling into depression and
| only these rituals slowly started giving them some stability
| back. This was a full 40-50 year time span. As a 40 year old
| myself I marvel at their strength to live out their lives, also
| during times where you couldn't even reach out to internet for
| support.
| memhole wrote:
| I can't imagine losing a child.
|
| I had a friend die suddenly a few years ago. He was a really
| influential person growing up.
|
| You go around thinking, oh I'll catch up later or reply another
| time and suddenly you can't. I've lost a number of people over
| the years, but for some reason that friend in particular has been
| a difficult one to get over.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924677 - June 2014 (25
| comments)
|
| _In memory of Rebecca Alison Meyer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863890 - June 2014 (69
| comments)
|
| _The Truth_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524028 -
| April 2014 (1 comment)
|
| _The Choice_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7013747 -
| Jan 2014 (1 comment)
| xdc0 wrote:
| I read all entries about Rebecca last night after reading this
| one. It is such a visceral and devastating chronicle expressed in
| a beautiful way, it left me deeply moved.
|
| I wonder how he felt after writing those words. I wonder if that
| beautiful ability to write what he feels so that many can feel a
| tiny glimpse of what he felt, helps to keep moving forward, even
| if a little bit.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Flickr Photo Album for Rebecca Alison Meyer
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/meyerweb/albums/72157645061445...
|
| warning - the comments for the last page of photos - so
| heartbreaking.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Remembering Rebecca Alison Meyer -
| https://heightsobserver.org/read/2014/06/17/remembering-rebe...
| shriek wrote:
| It never occurred to me to lookup the creator of the tool[1] that
| I used to use so often. It's so easy to overlook that there are
| actually humans with their own story (tragic or not) behind the
| tools that we use. I should learn to appreciate people behind the
| code more. And, I'm so sorry what you had to and are going
| through, Mr. Meyer.
|
| [1]. https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/
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