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A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

meyerweb.com

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Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#71

Post by yard2010 »

llm_trw wrote: post #69
lemonberry wrote: post #5

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 ye…

Just remember than not a century ago the average family would bury half their kids.

You never look on the same river because each time you look there's different water flowing.

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#72

Post by canucker2016 »

hifikuno wrote: post #27
canucker2016 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric Meyer's blog posts about his daughter Rebecca - see https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/rebecca...

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.

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.

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#73

Post by vishnugupta »

lemonberry wrote: post #5

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 ye…

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.

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#74

Post by orochimaaru »

CobaltFire wrote: post #70
canucker2016 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric Meyer's blog posts about his daughter Rebecca - see https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/rebecca...

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.

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.

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#75

Post by Syonyk »

vishnugupta wrote: post #73
lemonberry wrote: post #5

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 ye…

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, a…

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.

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#76

Post by Archelaos »

ignoramous wrote: post #36
hinkley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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/comments/1goyaco/when... In the present, orthodox practitioners of Abrahamic religions, in particular, may stoically overcome such…

You sound like one of the friends of Job.

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#78

Post by Syonyk »

hn666 wrote: post #3

This is one of those moments where, thanks to the internet, you catch a glimpse of another persons world. It gives some perspective.

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!

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#79

Post by Syonyk »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #60
kshahkshah wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

> 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…

> 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. :/

Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

#80

Post by AnIrishDuck »

mynameishere wrote: post #32
hinkley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

I have lost both a daughter and a dog.

I believe your intentions here are good, but I don't recommend trying to rank various types of grief.

Past a certain threshold, all kinds are both the same and incomparable.

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