71–80 of 137 posts
This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?
Deeply accepting the Mr. Peanutbutter philosophy of life brought me a deep sense of internal calm about issues like this. https://youtu.be/AfqTOhi7AnQ
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see the number of priests abusing children, and take that as an example that, neither religion made them a better person, neither they seem afraid of the after life they preach about...
And nevertheless the percentage of priests abusing children is lower than the percentage of school teachers doing the same. Make sure to bring that up every time you talk about the public school system.
This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?
I don't necessarily have anything for pre-loss anxiety, but I did suddenly lose my dad. As in talked to him the day before and he was feeling a little sick and the next day I learned that he had died alone in his home. Without going into some of the sadder details, I can tell you what helped the most. I felt complete in our relationship in the moment. I still have times when I wish I could share something with him. B…
It was as much for myself than for them.
This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?
I recently learned I have - at best - 2 years to live. Prognosis is fatal in 100% of cases, no known cure and only weak compensatory treatments of any kind. I'm in my 30s. Not religious either so I don't have the comfort of expecting an afterlife. I've been through a lot of hard things but I was always taught how to be resourceful and make it through hard times to the other side. No one teaches you how to die. There…
It helped me shift my thinking from death as an end to death as an experience
More than a year after my father died, my 6 year old son was inconsolably crying one night as my wife put him to bed. He hadn’t said anything about my father’s death until this night when he realized that it meant some day I would die. He was so sad at the thought and assumed I must be so sad about my father dying, that he was sad for me. I laid in bed with him talking about death and telling him how my father died—o…
In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was sure that the magic going in there is probably outside of what anybody can understand, and that it would take one thousand years to make any significant progress in said understanding. I hav…
Also, who says that aging and dying are not nature’s high level backpropagation? You’re one neuron, and it’s time to be > 0 is finite.
Besides, aren’t cancer cells trying to do the same thing you want to do? Live forever, with no regard for their place in the whole?
My favorite thing around the subject of death is The Grief Walker. Highly recommend anyone watch this. Don't forget to get tissues before you start. https://www.nfb.ca/film/griefwalker/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And nevertheless the percentage of priests abusing children is lower than the percentage of school teachers doing the same. Make sure to bring that up every time you talk about the public school system.
After shielding them from law enforcement, has the public school system moved teachers accused of child abuse into different schools in a new community allowing them the opportunity to abuse again?
I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…
You have to really work at it to truly die alone. Someone somewhere is going to remember you fondly unless you were a complete asshole. This is often the fate of lifetime narcissists who no longer have the energy or presence of mind to maintain the façade. Even the most vicious of bigots have well-wishers at their funerals. You have to mess up hard to be less liked than a Fred Phelps type.
I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…
First, all my most important pictures have people I care about it in them.
Second, I watched family-in-law going through old family photographs and discarding objectively wonderful but unmarked photos of people that no one could identify anymore, and heavily filtering photos of family members that were identifiable but no one still alive had known.
I had not put two and two together before that point, but even your own great grandchildren will not treasure photos of you and your exploits. And why would they? They are strangers. It is no different with myself and my own great grandparents, even if I wish otherwise.
It reframed the purpose of photography for me. In a sense its whole function is really as a memory aid, to help me recall good times, connect over shared memories, and strengthen my personal bond with friends and family.
I do really hope that “alone” is not the fate for everyone, although I haven’t figured out how that’s supposed to happen in an age where friends and family uproot and spread around the globe like leaves in the breeze.