My sister passed away a year ago due to Bipolar disorder. The pain my family went through her years of sickness and after her passing has been immense. My mother talks about it often, but my father almost never does.
For me, I talk to my wife about it at times, but can never bring myself to talk to my parents about it.
A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
91–100 of 179 posts
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 r…
>> 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. :-)
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 r…
>> 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 "some…
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.
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#94Sometimes 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.
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 ba…
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.)
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#95In 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.
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#96I 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…
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.
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ba…
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.)
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.
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#98Earlier 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…
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You're effectively invoking Ring Theory - https://speakinggrief.org/get-better-at-grief/supporting-gri... - which I think is a strong foundation for navigating grief and distress.
But I don't think it's a valid criticism here because OP actively calls out they trying to find the most appropriate path for empathy ("support in") while deliberately not equating the two experiences of grief (avoiding "complain in").
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#99This 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 -…
Just wait until AI can feel pain- you know it will happen eventually when they have physical sensors and enough compute.
Re: A decade later, a decade lost (2024)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
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…
> 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.