Dating While Dying
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is just a fact between us, and it's something we'll have to deal with. I fell for her, she fell for me, we work well on so many levels.
I know she is likely to die (a 12 month life expectancy isn't a foregone conclusion) but we don't discuss this or make it a focus. Our focus is on living life with passion, a clock that counts 70 years or 1 year doesn't change our approach to life.
I don't really know what to say, I just wanted to put an acknowledgement from myself to the universe down somewhere that yes I know what I'm getting myself into, and yet I love her and it's worth it.
Live life qualitatively not quantitatively.
I'm sure you've already done some research but I would definitely suggest familiarizing yourself with the various treatment options that are 'standard of care', gain an understanding about the pros/cons of clinical trials, how they select candidate patients and maybe scan around for trials that are applicable to her case. Also it becomes incredibly difficult to keep weight on, at least for my wife who is by any standard presently malnourished. Finding simple to eat shakes/smoothies/etc are very helpful.
If she has a full hysterectomy she's likely to struggle with night sweats. I bought my wife a BedJet last year for that but it has turned out to be a wonderful thing in the winter as well to help keep her warm.
Anyway, best of luck to the both of you.
"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."
I'm glad you're taking it well, I hope you both find peace and equanimity with the situation.
I hope that your journey together is wonderful, no matter how long it is.
http://apainintheneck.com/2019/11/16/the-worst-thing/
† The author's obituary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/obituaries/josie-rubio-de...
In the days of paper, if you didn’t pay for your subscription, you didn’t get the newspaper at all.
Every fucking thing is an upsell. Every goddamned thing. And the funeral home salespeople use the fact it's a death to capitalize on it any way they can.
sales: 'Do you want flowers for the casket? $1100'
mom: 'No'
sales: 'Don't you think he's worth flowers?'
mom: 'alright...'
sales: 'heres our selection of caskets, many families choose these ($6000)'
mom: 'but he doesnt care, he's dead'
sales: 'dont you love your husband?'As it is, obits are paid for by the word when they're printed. But apparently a few hundred dollars isn't enough to serve a simple webpage for a few decades.
It would be one thing if it were just an upfront one-time fee along with the publishing. But hitting you up after it's been "published", and instant-but-short-gratification options like $3 to unlock for 24 hours (etc) is just predatory.
Contrast the experience of buying a paper with the obit, keeping it, and running across it in ten years with the experience of hitting a truncated webpage that uses your lament to hit you up for money.
As for the casket, I believe the cheapest pine box is good enough for me (or cremation). Of course the metal vault around the casket is defiantly needed...you know in case of a zombie outbreak ;)
I told them I want the cheapest solution and the best logistics (so that someone did all the paperwork when I die). And that nobody discusses what we agreed upon once I am not here anymore to negotiate :)
It was great. They showed me the catalog going straight for the cheapest options and suggested I come back a year later as it will be cheaper for me.
I think the funeral business is changing in France because more prone are like me, they plan their funerals in advance so they are much more relaxed discussing than the ones who come right after someone's death, to fall with it.
Actually it is not. It's quite the opposite. The obituary is written and published for the living, to inform everyone of your death and to let family and loved ones express themselves. You are dead, so you don't care or read the obituary. the ones surviving you will handle that.
It makes me think of all the people who don't have a terminal disease but still never manage to find someone. Their case, while sad, is perhaps not as tragic.
finding a partner in such trying times can be a life-anchor, and it can increase your strength and will to live.
for some it can mean the difference of a few months or years, for some it could even mean the strength to beat the illness outright.
https://www.facebook.com/josie.rubio.33/posts/10156307361797...
I'm glad she found someone worthy to spend her last days with. I can definitely relate to overreacting toward the existential dread of social situations/interactions.
A few months after I met her, she was killed in a drunk driving accident.
On the other hand, I also met someone who had a brain tumor when she was in her 20's, her life expectancy was unknown, her long-term boyfriend at the time left her because he couldn't deal with it. When I met her she was in her mid-40's, happily married with kids - she had successful surgery to remove the tumor.
Everyone has a limited lifetime and you don't always know how short it will be.
Other than that, wow, what a story and courage. The napkin bit really got me. 42 is way too young to die.
Complaining about paywalls isn’t productive.
There are plenty of disabled men in functional relatioships (and not-so-functional ones, there is a subset of people, male or female, that are specifically attracted to ill or dying partners for problematic reasons). Please lose the incel angle.
You cannot discount my experiences and observations unless you have gone through this yourself.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5ajj7/how-dating-works-w...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2017/01/09/wh...
You might consider finding a local support group for people who've recently lost their sight.
Any examples of men successfully dating after starting to lose their eyesight? Or other disabilities?
I think I've read other articles in the past about women with disabilities having a relatively easy time dating, but men with disabilities having a lot more difficulty.
The first mentions dating within the blind community, which would likely make things substantially easier on both parties.
I've seen enough weird parings and horrible people in relationships to feel quite comfortable with the statement "blind isn't a guaranteed deal-breaker". I do suspect the recency matters a lot - grief after loss can be all-consuming and take time to come to terms with.
Side note: My spouse is disabled, so I'm also quite comfortable with the concept of dating someone with a disability.
I got married after symptoms began. It was not easy but life doesn't stop. I'm still coming to terms and searching for something that works meds/supplements/physical therapy. However, I don't considered myself disabled even though this is quite limiting and I require more rest.
I think once one accepts your alignment and find ways of still being a member of the society, one will have a much better luck dating. I think the depression that these problems bring is just really hard to deal with and affects people around us.
What I found might surprise you. Blind people have normal relationships just like anyone else, and conferences tend to be a hotbed of dating and connection-making beyond just the topic of the day. My best friend is happily married now for more than 10 years, and I am in a long-term relationship coming up on my 2nd year anniversary. I've since met multiple blind people in the tech industry and found most of them to be successful in their career and in their relationships.
I'd heavily recommend you get involved in local groups and also to go out and do whatever activities interest you. Most people are more accepting than you might imagine. There's a lot of things that might be difficult due to visual acuity, but people are understanding are willing to give you space to be part of the group. For instance, I've found that board gaming and D&D are very popular activities with the geekier folks I know in the blind community, and for those who are partially sighted using assistive technology like magnification cameras on their phone or similar makes these things possible to do without significant impairment. You'll be more likely to meet someone you're compatible with if you get out of the house and go participate in mixed gender hobbies.
You may not want to hear this, but it's the truest observation I've made. Those folks who are struggling in the blind community have often put themselves in a situation to struggle. There's pervasive negative feedback loops when someone becomes disabled, especially if they become disabled later in life. It's easy to become hopeless, and it's easy for your own insecurities about your disability to sabotage the relationships you'd otherwise have, both professional and romantic. In the words of my best friend, "You're blind. So what? So am I. Go make something of yourself." Don't get fooled into throwing yourself a pity party. Instead go do the things necessary in your life to be an attractive romantic partner, and you will find that your disability is not the impediment you imagine. Romance is about emotional connection, first and foremost.
Are you saying this seriously? Go to a local club for blind people, or some club for people with some other disability, and you'll find many living perfectly normal lives, in relationships, etc. You will also find several who don't have a relationship (which also true in abled people). But it's in no way like you need to be a famous artist/billionaire etc to be blind/disabled/etc and have a relationship. Not even close.
>You cannot discount my experiences and observations unless you have gone through this yourself.
You can, if they are not accurate.
That would be such an unacceptable response in any other context ( eg: there are plenty of women who are CEOs, there are plenty of <minority> millionaires. Please lose the victim angle). But somehow such cruelty is acceptable towards "incel" men.
I personally know someone who is an wheelchair and was abandoned by their SO ( can't really blame her ) after his condition and has ever since been unable to find someone.
you mean excellent data backed, well laid-out argument like this ?
> There are plenty of disabled men in functional relatioships
I don't know what to make of that anecdote. Maybe it means nothing. But it has stuck in my mind ever since I read it.
Yeah, so? And I know people who stick to their spouses.
GP already said that? not quite sure what point ur trying to make
> plenty of disabled men in functional relatioships
Also, men are lonely and this reflects heavily in suicide rates by gender. If someone is lonely, they should be allowed to complain. Casting them away with a label only makes things worse for them. Don't you have empathy? Can't you garner sympathy for a person who is missing out on one of the basic human needs (emotional connection)?
Proof: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5492308/
"For suicide attempts, for which the rate is estimated to be 20 times higher than that of suicides , the gender gap is less pronounced, with females demonstrating a disproportionately higher rate of suicide attempts compared to males ."
One theory is that things we code as suicide attempts are instead acts of self-harm intended to act as a cry for help instead of a genuine attempts to end your life. In which case, if women do have stronger social support networks that would respond to these cries for help, you'd expect exactly that kind of weird imbalance and difference in success rates.
I believe this accounts for part of the difference. Another element is that someone who attempts suicide and fails is likely to attempt to commit suicide repeatedly. If the average man attempts suicide once before succeeding, and the average woman attempts suicide three times before succeeding, even assuming equal propensities to suicide women will show up in the statistics as attempting it three times as often as men.
There are countries where women die by suicide more often than men.
You need to be careful with how you're defining a death by suicide too. Someone who shoots themself in the head is more likely to be counted as a death by suicide than someone who overdoses on prescription meds, because the intent is clearer.
> Another element is that someone who attempts suicide and fails is likely to attempt to commit suicide repeatedly.
This is incorrect. Some people do make multiple attempts, but plenty of people don't.
Agreed. We might take the fact that more women die by suicide than men in those countries to say that women are relatively worse off than men in those countries than women are to men in countries where the ratio is reversed.
> You need to be careful with how you're defining a death by suicide too. Someone who shoots themself in the head is more likely to be counted as a death by suicide than someone who overdoses on prescription meds, because the intent is clearer.
Agreed, but it's unclear which direction this would push the numbers: more men die by drug overdose than do women, though I can't find a breakdown by gender of prescription drug overdose. And plenty of other methods can also be miscoded, e.g. intentional car crashes, which are one of men's preferred methods. The only ones that I'd expect to be coded correctly most of the time are exsanguination and hanging. But we've got to do the best we can with the numbers we have, and try to improve accuracy while we're at it.
> This is incorrect. Some people do make multiple attempts, but plenty of people don't.
Correction noted. A previous attempt at death by suicide is a significant risk factor for future attempts at suicide, with somewhere between a third and a half of deaths by suicide being on a second-or-more attempt, but my "likely" was incorrect. It also seems like reattempts aren't likely to account for the gendered divergence in attempts versus deaths, because the large majority of first attempts at suicide don't result in future attempts.
From my understanding, explicit, fatalist despairing of your sex life is the red/black pills to which incels refer. It is definitely an attitude to be concerned about, regardless of what labels you want to use, because it's a worldview that will reproduce itself without intervention.
> Can't you garner sympathy for a person who is missing out on one of the basic human needs (emotional connection)?
Do you think the advice to lose the incel angle (i.e. and actually admit the possibility of future relationships) was bad advice? That strikes me as more helpful than pitying him.
The amount of women in stable heterosexual relationship is the same as amount of males in heterosexual relationship. If you talk about people having one night stands randomly, there is no connection except sex there.
The most lonely isolating experience I ever had was being at home with children. It may just be that this gives one training for how to deal with being alone and tilts female culture towards behavior that prevents loneliness. Plus it makes it more acceptable for woman to display behavior that prevents loneliness in long term.
> The amount of women in stable heterosexual relationship is the same as amount of males in heterosexual relationship.
Yes, you're completely right. However (in the culture I'm in) men usually take action to ask out/talk to women. This asymmetry theoretically leads to men getting rejected until they're not, and women meeting unworthy men until they don't. So each gender has an entirely different perspective on the same dating market. Personally speaking, it is hard for me to fully understand my female friends' difficulties with dating (or friendships) because I've only experienced it as a male, so many things they have difficulty with are things I take for granted (this usually goes the other way too).
Unless there's a huge cultural shift, men and women will keep having completely orthogonal experiences and until then, empathy remains the biggest asset for us to treat each other with.
It is not binary either choice. And ideally partners have shared friends.
One of the things you learn when being in situation I describes is value of causual connections and friends. And the need to work for them in various ways.
It's already a bit dodgy when people respond to other's experience by telling them what's wrong with them, especially when their experience is painful. But blunt one-liners and internet tropes ("lose the incel angle") should be right out. Upping the ante like you did in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21721545 is seriously not ok.
What to do instead? First edit out personal criticisms—they're unlikely to land well. Second, it's always ok to share your own experience. For example, if your comment here was based on experiences or observations of your own, it might have been both interesting and respectful to share some of that.
Would actually be interesting to learn more about it.
Could be women attracted to bad boys. Or many they like the safety of the guy being behind bars. Or not being able to see someone makes it possible to dwell on the imagination. Also, helper syndrome.
Edit: this came up with Google, for example https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5582019/Women-resis...
"Psychologist and psychometrician Dr. Robert Sternberg, a former president of the University of Wyoming who currently teaches human development courses at Cornell, said: ‘Falling in love with a prisoner reduces your risk while preserving some of the excitement. For people who have issues with intimacy and commitment, it gives them an out of a having a relationship in which you can have the exciting passion without having to put in too much intimacy or passion."
"‘I think that what happens in these kinds of cases is that people, tend to build up a fantasy world. That’s what people do and who is to say to another person that you’re crazy and I’m not.’"
https://www.rand.org/news/press/2019/02/25.html
> arrested and convicted [...] we see an association with a variety of negative trends later in life, including lower chances of being married and less economic success,” Smith said.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293638/
> incarceration dramatically increases the odds of divorce
I think it was more "if a serial killer can find love, so can a blind person".
The answer to that is no, being man in or after prison does not make you more attractive to women. No, average woman is not attracted to safety of imprisoned males nor to he badness. Nor does absent husband makes imagination go wild and marriage better.
All these speculations as speculations about women are wrong based on stats.
And the bit about serial killer finding love is also dubious. We are talking about people with several emotional problems and lifetime of abuse (typically both as victims and perpetrators) on both sides. These are not kind of relationship a healthy blind or non blind person wants.
Nobody claimed it's "average women" who are attracted to prisoners.
As for speculations, it seems to be a fact that some prisoners manage to form relationships with women. And the article I linked to also states some of the same reasons I speculated about.
What bothers you about it?
" These are not kind of relationship a healthy blind or non blind person wants."
Nobody is saying you should date a prisoner. Just that it seems to happen. That is not a matter of opinion, it is just reality.
https://www.rand.org/news/press/2019/02/25.html
As more Americans are arrested and convicted during their younger years, we see an association with a variety of negative trends later in life, including lower chances of being married and less economic success,” Smith said.
Also, prison time increases divorce rates.
Their point was simply that a non-negligible number of men in prison can attract partners, which is obviously true.
That said, I don't think that's helpful information to an individual with an increasingly severe disability, and a belief or lived experience that others won't or don't see them as an attractive partner.
I don't find that obviously true. Not obvious at all. And the more I look into it, the less probable it is.
Peoplw after prison have huge problems getting back to life including finding partners.
It’s a significant enough phenomenon that media articles are written about it, academic studies are done on it, a scientific term has been coined for it, and multiple websites operate to facilitate it:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
None of this contradicts your assertion that “people after prison have huge problems getting back to life including finding partners” - but that’s not a refutation of what I or the original commenter are arguing.
Article says the service exists and also that many those who write letters dont seek partner. (And also, I know about program where males write with prisoners and it is not about them being gay).
Quoting article: For those who instigate and sustain a relationship with a man imprisoned for a lengthy period of time, physical contact is obviously limited. They often never progress beyond the courting stage.
Anyway, we’re clearly in futile territory when we’re debating the definition of words like “significant” in a topic that has nothing to do with the article posted, so I’m certainly done here.
For the record I still don’t think it’s a helpful thing to point out to someone with a worsening disability; as the article and other commenters have pointed out, people who want to interact with prisoners have particular motivations, and they likely won’t apply to people with disabilities.
It is not that he does not have chance. But common, it is harder for disabled people of both genders.
And yes, this thread made prison relationships sound way more probable then they are. It is much less convincing argument that "it is not entirely impossible and some few people can find relationship as prisoners".
And from discussion people did seemed to buy the "significant amount of prisoners get love" argument in it. Even speculating about women finding safety in ot or "liking bad" guys. Both very wrong conclusions.
If you’d just said “in reality this doesn’t happen very often” this subthread could’ve been much shorter :)
Loneliness is awful, and dating sucks. But I assure you, the behavior from this woman's boyfriend is a human trait that can be found across all genders. Please do not give up and consider yourself undatable.
Are you in therapy or a support group of some kind to deal with the very real, very legitimate feelings this change of circumstances causes?
Please seek out support groups or one-on-one counseling related to your condition. I think a good place to start would be through the doctor's who diagnosed you. You could ask for referrals to counselors or support groups.
Honestly, that sounds much more fun than living with a constant obsession over your own mortality.
It sounds fun until it's not. The reality of how fragile we are catches up to everyone, and living life like you're invincible just speeds up that process.
Sidenote—a cacaphony is a discordant mixture of sounds—not sure if that's the word you meant to use above.
On the other side, there are those who make you feel amazing every time you do it, and the real risks are minimal. One example - sport climbing. Facing fear of one's death, while being safely belayed on rope that can hold 2 tonnes of static load. Overcoming that fear. Backpacking around the developing (but not so much) world, an extremely rewarding experience every single time. I would add tons of social activities with good friends to this.
Such a life won't feel 'wasted' in any measurable way, while being almost as safe as sitting at home reading books (and probably better for your eyesight).
[1] Maybe not even recklessly, I just wasn't aware that ultra-loud music for hours in a disco can cause tinnitus.
Living like you're immortal until you're not is how people end up on their death bed regretting how they spent their time on earth. Like arguing on HN instead of calling your mother.
Living like you're mortal, to me, suggests someone who lives in the moment and maximizes their life fulfillment. Not someone who lives in fear of death, which I'd argue is why we spend so much time living like we're immortal.
Yeah. I recall a cancer surgeon commenting, roughly, that they thought people with an early onset, and then a long life, were the lucky ones. And among the saddest, those healthy until blindsided by discovering they were mortal. And always had been. But now had little time to live shaped by that realization.
As with many things, it can be cheaper to learn from others' experiences. Or to notice and successfully learn from hints in one's own.
But it can be hard. I was friends with someone with a large extended family. So funerals were recurrent. Some expected, some randomized blows. For days after, it was easier to treasure time, life. But with passing weeks, the effect would decay. Easier to be distracted. To forget that some very few things are important, and most not. Until the next funeral.
If that moves you, I recommend I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter (2007).[0]
> Theories aside, it's impossible not to experience this book as a tender, remarkably personal and poignant effort to understand the death of his wife from cancer in 1993—and to grasp how consciousness mediates our otherwise ineffable relationships. In the end, Hofstadter's view is deeply philosophical rather than scientific. It's hopeful and romantic as well, as his model allows one consciousness to create and maintain within itself true representations of the essence of another.
0) https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter-eb...
It is a real gut-punch when you know exactly when you're going to die, especially if that date is not far off.