Goodbye Marco • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodbye Marco

#31

Post by jbeales » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 3:23 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #27

jbeales wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to you my friends, smell the flowers while you can. I'm 35, and I've already lost at least 4 friends. Causes of death: Drunk driving, Suicide, Murder, and bacterial infection/dropped dead. The friend with the infection was a super-healthy woman who was opening a fitness studio, one of those people that you would expect to grow old, not catch a random bug and die.

What bug? This is something of a fear of mine, especially after my wife received a MRSA infection a few years ago.

Internet obit says "a rare form of Group A streptococcal disease"

I know she was feeling crappy, enough to head into a hospital late-ish at night, and apparently by that time her kidneys had already shut down. I don't live in the same city as she did anymore, so I don't have any more info.

Re: Goodbye Marco

#32

Post by lmedinas » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 3:38 PM UTC

Has a former GNOME Fundation member I would like to wish my deepest condolences to his family. It's very sad to see someone leave us so young. The FOSS lost a great mind, his work will was/is/will be in our Linux Desktop for some time.

Thank you Marco!

Re: Goodbye Marco

#33

Post by lisper » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 3:40 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #8

So sorry to hear this; Evince rocks! On a side note, as someone with cancer i'm getting more and more annoyed with people saying 'lost the fight' 'after a long fight' etc. Somehow (and I know more people have this) it makes it feel like you didn't try hard enough. Stop saying that please.

> Stop saying that please.

What should we say instead?

Re: Goodbye Marco

#34

Post by 2mur » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 3:43 PM UTC

jbeales wrote: post #31

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bug? This is something of a fear of mine, especially after my wife received a MRSA infection a few years ago.

Internet obit says "a rare form of Group A streptococcal disease" I know she was feeling crappy, enough to head into a hospital late-ish at night, and apparently by that time her kidneys had already shut down. I don't live in the same city as she did anymore, so I don't have any more info.

Sounds like it could have been toxic shock syndrome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_shock_syndrome

Re: Goodbye Marco

#35

Post by tagrun » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #20

tluyben2 wrote: post #8

So sorry to hear this; Evince rocks! On a side note, as someone with cancer i'm getting more and more annoyed with people saying 'lost the fight' 'after a long fight' etc. Somehow (and I know more people have this) it makes it feel like you didn't try hard enough. Stop saying that please.

As a long time hospice spouse, I wonder if "Living with cancer" might better capture what matters. The battle metaphor often leads to medical approaches that reduce quality of life and induce pointless suffering. Accepting the inevitable fact of mortality isn't necessarily surrender, sometimes it is innate wisdom.

On another perspective, life itself is a fight.

Re: Goodbye Marco

#36

Post by DINKDINK » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #33

tluyben2 wrote: post #8

So sorry to hear this; Evince rocks! On a side note, as someone with cancer i'm getting more and more annoyed with people saying 'lost the fight' 'after a long fight' etc. Somehow (and I know more people have this) it makes it feel like you didn't try hard enough. Stop saying that please.

> Stop saying that please. What should we say instead?

Possibly 'succumbed'

Re: Goodbye Marco

#37

Post by Avitas » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #22

brudgers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time hospice spouse, I wonder if "Living with cancer" might better capture what matters. The battle metaphor often leads to medical approaches that reduce quality of life and induce pointless suffering. Accepting the inevitable fact of mortality isn't necessarily surrender, sometimes it is innate wisdom.

On that note, I really liked this conversation of D. G. Mayers (who died of cancer in September) regarding this topic. A small excerpt: "Tony Gwynn died recently, just last month, of salivary gland cancer. (…) He was a great ball player, and a great man. He had salivary gland cancer for 8 years. (…) Every article about Gwynn's death quite rightly celebrated his prowess on the ball field and what a wonderful man he wa…

This seems like very good idea to me. It is good enough that I will try to remind people in-person and online about it.

I have given eulogies before. I have focused on only things I wanted to remember and perhaps things I thought others would want to remember--not that there's anything majorly wrong with that. It is not easy to devise guidelines about what should and should not be communicated. But, I do think it is a disservice to someone's life with a disease to be summarized with a single word or short phrase--ESPECIALLY if that time frame is many years.

In summary, I see the issues as:

- Individuals summarizing another person's experience with a disease or condition using single words or short phrases such as "battle" or "long fight"

- Focusing only on periods of their life prior to to their diagnosis

- The ignoring of accomplishments, day-to-day realities of life, significant persons, significant places, etc. after their diagnosis

Re: Goodbye Marco

#38

Post by jdoss » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

amyjess wrote: post #21

Oh man... Marco created Galeon, which was my favorite browser back in the 1.2 days. He'll be missed.

Galeon was my favorite too. The best thing about it was you could bookmark search dialog boxes and it would show a search dialog box right in the bookmark bar From there, you could search for something and it would open up a new tab. It may not seem like a lot, but my coworkers and sped up our workflows by quite a lot once we figured this out back in the day.

Re: Goodbye Marco

#39

Post by Fordrus » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #8

So sorry to hear this; Evince rocks! On a side note, as someone with cancer i'm getting more and more annoyed with people saying 'lost the fight' 'after a long fight' etc. Somehow (and I know more people have this) it makes it feel like you didn't try hard enough. Stop saying that please.

I agree that it certainly isn't accurate to assert that they (or you) could've done more, but I hesitate to tell people to stop using that terminology. Because it IS a fight, and it's one that each day brings us closer to collectively winning properly.

I'm a bioinformatician working in genetics- I'm moving away a little from cancer genetics right now, but I've been involved some in the past. I think it'd be a little more accurate to assert that people like ME lost the battle against cancer- because we're the ones trying to understand cancer behavior and develop effective treatments. I celebrate that people see cancer as something to be 'fought', though, and hope that even more talented programmers will enter the fray.

Here's hoping your fight against cancer goes well, and that you have many happy days ahead, tluyben2! :)

Re: Goodbye Marco

#40

Post by hsitz » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

csbrooks wrote: post #25

tluyben2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you die of something else, these terms are not used. Or maybe I didn't see, but you don't say 'after fighting alzheimers' 'after fighting ALS' etc, they just say; he/she died of X. That feels more fair than taking some kind of process into account whereby one gets the feeling that if you had battled harder you would've come out on top. For many cancers this is simply not the case yet; I was 'lucky', he was n…

Interesting point. I wonder if one reason for the difference in language is that chemotherapy is so brutal that it ends up feeling like a "battle". Plus maybe that there's a chance of "winning", which isn't there with Alzheimer's or with ALS. (I'm not justifying the correctness of the word, just speculating on the cause.)

It's that "chance of winning" thing when "battling" that's part of the reason it shouldn't be used. Too easy to imply (or for others to infer) that if they don't win it's because they didn't fight hard enough. Better to just get rid of the battle analogy altogether, IMO.