A decade later, a decade lost (2024) | Hacker News Reader

A decade later, a decade lost (2024)

meyerweb.com

548 pointsZeWaka170 comments

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 year. It changed both of them. They've done amazing things since then, but you can see the weight on their faces.

I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone.

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 if your job or social circle involves them.

The author said he has a therapist, but I wonder if he’s had one the whole time or if he failed to process at the time and is now paying for letting it sink into his bones.

He's been writing about Rebecca and his family's journey since pretty early in her diagnosis if I remember correctly. I remember when he posted about her passing too.

Grief comes in waves. Long after you think the storm has passed. We all process it differently. A 16th birthday is pretty big milestone in the states. I imagine that can be a magnifying glass for grief and pain. I know my friends feel the weight of their son's birthday and the date of his passing quite heavily.

I lost my mom 16 years ago. To this day something can remind of her and it's like time stops. It's dizzying as the world around me moves on. Then I catch up again until the next wave.

> 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.

Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog can rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the bond between person and dog is reinforced through daily activities.

I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss. Some losses may be painful longer than others, for sure, but the pain of losing a being you love is universal.

A friend of mine described the pain of this type of loss thusly;

  Think of the pain like a ball bouncing around in a box,
  with a button at center-bottom which activates pain every
  time it is touched by the ball.

  At first, the ball is almost the same size as the box
  and hits the button constantly.

  Over time, the ball shrinks but the size of the box
  and the button remain the same.  All that changes is
  how often the button is hit.

HTH

I don’t want to diminish anyone else’s experience but my neutered dog did not miss out on growing up and starting a life of his own. Pursuing a career, falling in love, having a child.

At three a dog has had many of the milestones he will have in life. What I miss is the time I and my circle lost with him. Not the experiences he didn’t get to have, or the new people he might have brought into the world, and their experiences. I would have shown him more of the same life in minor variations, not things I wouldn’t even dream of doing myself.

I did not interpret your post as diminishing anyone.

The main point I wanted to share is that loss has a commonality in it always precedes pain and must be dealt with similarly. Comparing its form was never my intent nor do I hold there is any fundamental difference between them.

That's just my opinion though.

> Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog can rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the bond between person and dog is reinforced through daily activities. I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss. Some losses may be painful longer than others, for sure, but the pain of losing a being you love is universal.

This is beautifully illustrated by this line from Leonard Cohen's "Everybody knows":

"Everybody got this broken feeling Like their father or their dog just died"

As someone who has lost both a parent and a dog, I can relate completely to this.

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 profound grief by attributing it to divine will.

You sound like one of the friends of Job.

How so? They're neither questioning God's justice, nor asserting that the loss of children must be due to sin/unrighteousness/etc.

That reminds me the story of Mozart's parents. Their first 3 children died less than 1 year old. I can't imagine the despair. Out of 7 children, only 2 survived infancy.

> And that was just a dog.

I forget which book I read this in, but the author in their autobiography described their "real man" father as someone who they'd only seen cry three times in his life. When his wife died, he was all stoic about it and didn't show any upset in public. But when his favorite dog died, he broke down crying.

Many people who don't understand how upset one can get over a dog, have never had one. I have a photo of our first family dog and it still makes me upset if I look at it for too long.

Well humans are aware of their own mortality and can talk about it with one another. Your man can find peace because he would know his wifes outlook on life and her wishes

We are entirely responsible for the health and welfare of domestic dogs, like young children.

I will be downvoted but that ("real man", no crying for the wife passing away...) tells more about subtle "machismo" and patriarchy that about how much people can care about dogs.

Grief is complex and deeply personal, and is not about fitting someone else's expectations... Losing a dog hits different because their presence is so genuine and uncomplicated. They provide unconditional comfort. That connection is usually way less complicated than the ones with have with people.

Let's add conformity to (wrong? IMO totally) social/religious rules like "you cannot divorce". Because if your spouse passes away, either young or when it was their time so to speak, and you aren't genuinely sad, well, why were you two still together? If you spent a happy life together with someone, you should be sad even if they passed away serenely, because hey, it was the person with whom you shared and lived almost everything. If instead you were still together but actually secretly hating each other, or just because "it was always like that", well, the marriage should have not lasted til that point. If it did, it was most probably due to social rules to follow no matter what and/or patriarchy. And if it was a young person, well, even more! A young loss should generate even more grief. And the "real man" part...well, I think it explains itself.

I understand this can come off as simplifying too much but I believe it boils down to those reasons in the vast majority of cases. So, there can be exceptions of course but they are a minority.

A bit daft, but my dad died when I was 6 and I had (and probably still have) a lot of issues expressing grief at the time.

I absolutely lost it when a pet goldfish died ~5 years later. This kind of stuff can come up at the weirdest time.

What I have found is that each new grief brings all the others with it. Morning the new sorrow is tied up with morning the old sorrows.

Hmm, I've not really found that to be the case personally. Past that initial shit period up until my late teens, subsequent losses and grief has been quite different.

I had an unrequited love thing in college that never got resolved but I gave up and started trying to date. The second one sat me down one day and said we were only ever going to be friends. I was grumpy the rest of the night but when I got home I just crumbled to dust. We would have been a terrible match, so it was the right thing to do. I don’t even know that we would have been friends except we had one in common. I didn’t understand why I felt so unanchored around her and so we stopped hanging out. Which I realized is just the sort of thing women complain about with male friendships but what can you do.

It took a while to realize I wasn’t grieving her. I was jammed in the Denial phase of a previous loss and adding a few more rocks to the pile caused an avalanche. I’m betting that’s what happened with your goldfish.

We had a wonderful, affectionate, snuggly cat who also had a congenital defect. She only made it to a year and seven months old (having adopted her at around 8 weeks old). We lost her almost two and a half years ago, and I still cry over her memory once every couple weeks, and think about her multiple times a day.

I don't have children, but if I ever do, I am worried that my experience with this wonderful little cat will turn me into an anxious, unhealthily-overprotective mess when it comes to any children I might have.

When you hit college age is often when your odds of experiencing the first death in your family spikes up. Grandparent, great grandparent, oldest aunt. It happened to a number of friends of friends and acquaintances. Some people were a complete mess and others were more resilient.

The pattern I noticed was the people who had lost a pet were more equipped to deal with the loss of a human. The worst hit people never even had pets. Maybe a coincidence, but I suspect not. I don’t think it hurts any less, but you know better what needs to be done to move through it instead of getting stuck.

(Sorry for your loss)

My mother died during my second year of college. My father died when I was in my 30s. My mother's parents died before I was born, and my father's had both died by the time I was 10 or so.

We had cats when I was a kid, and two of them died while I was in my early/mid teens. They were "mom's cats", and at the time I didn't understand why it affected her so deeply. It made me sad, to be sure (both cats had been around my entire life up to that point), but I didn't get it. Not until I lost my own cat, anyway.

In a strange way, a way that I sometimes feel bad about, losing my cat hit me harder than losing my parents.

> (Sorry for your loss)

Thank you!

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 single night since then. She's 7 years old and I still can't stop myself from checking on her. My friend is one of the good-est people I know. A genuinely good person. Why him? And if him, certainly why not me?

I've had nothing like this happen, but somehow I get this--I was spooked by anecdotes about SIDS before having kids. When we had our daughter, and she was sleeping in her crib in our room, the first couple of months I'd basically wake up when she wasn't making noise, would then in dazed half-sleep wait for her to make any noise to confirm she was still alive (or check, sometimes), and could only then fall back asleep again. This only really quieted down one year in, when the statistical risk goes down. I guess it's fairly easy to get hypersensitized to dangers like this.

> 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 change the things
  which should be changed,
  and the Wisdom to distinguish
  the one from the other.[0]

Or:

  Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the 
  rest as it happens. Some things are up to us [eph' hêmin] 
  and some things are not up to us.[0]

Or:

  If there's a remedy when trouble strikes,
  What reason is there for dejection?
  And if there is no help for it,
  What use is there in being glum?[0]

HTH

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer

> 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. :/

>> 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. :-)

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.

> My friend is one of the good-est people I know. A genuinely good person. Why him? And if him, certainly why not me?

Because random tragedy doesn't know or care about how good or bad you are. It just strikes, randomly, without direction.

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.

and even 100 years ago was so much better than 200 years ago https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

Let's hope the impact of RFK Jr on US health and vaccination of children won't be too big.

Yes, exactly my thought. The graveyard in my dad's hometown has a huge section just for small kids, because life in the country was tough, and that was normal.

I remember once walking through a graveyard and seeing three names on a single headstone - three children, siblings who had all died on the same day. Below their names was a simple caption: "All gone".

I have no idea what the story is or how those children died, but I think about that headstone all the time, especially now I have a child of my own. So much grief, pain and tragedy conveyed so succinctly. I'm clenching my gut right now just thinking about it as I type.

Tangential, and I am reluctant to share this in an important thread about loss and grief, but an occasional hobby of mine is finding an interesting headstone during my travels and researching the story.

- https://opposite-lock.com/topic/28187/memorial-mysteries

- https://opposite-lock.com/topic/4273/the-milhon-brothers-sub...

I remember reading that the upper classes didn't even name their children until they were a few years old and had gotten past the crucial disease stage.

Why only the upper classes?

I dont know if what he said is true, but passing on full first/middle name lineage was more common in the upper classes and that might have affected it.

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.

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.

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.

> Great post here, and yea, things hit so much harder after kids ... remember seeing a photo of a man in India carrying his daughter killed by the tsunami

Also from India, a bereaved mother is barely able to speak to the loss of her 2 children, right after having spoke about 6 other deaths in her family: https://youtu.be/XLl2qAprU8w?t=312

I've seen that clip before, but after having kids, it hits like a truck. That said, children or not, there's no shortage of people who mock or deny or won't sympathise with "others" (outgroup).

Speaking of tsunami, I remember watching on TV a mother when was shown the bodies of both her husband and son. She was unable to show emotion at all. Just empty look and silence

> Grief = unspent love

God thats poignant :( Glad you said that for me to keep tho

Stories like this hit me harder after having children, too.

But they also provoke thankfulness for all I have. For a little while after I read such tragic stories, I try to enjoy the everyday life a bit more, enjoy the presence of the loved ones.

Memento mori.

I agree entirely. I have two wonderful daughters, and stories like this hit hard.

There is a fiction short-story called CHICXULUB By T. Coraghessan Boyle. It is one of the hardest hitting stories I have read as a parent. Still brings tears to my eyes. Recommended.

Thanks for the recommendation, it was a harrowing read. I'll have to re-visit this in 10-15 years when I'm no longer a young bachelor.

Here's a link for anyone else who wants to read it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/01/chicxulub

Archive link - http://archive.today/Ez5q6

Three months after my son was born, I made the mistake of following the news about the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes[0], especially in the Hatay region. I thought I was tough, as I had lived through the chaos and death of a disaster before, in 1999[1]. This time, I was far away in Germany, so not actually where it happened. But no.

Back then, as a teenager, I could somehow handle seeing people take their last breath on a sidewalk (don't get me wrong: It was absolutely horrible, but I could keep functioning, eat, sleep, even help people carry first aid kits). I remember being outside our building and asking my father where all those buildings went, in some of which my friends lived. He had chosen not to lie to me, and I still didn't break.

But one photo from 2023, a child's grave with a toy helicopter on top, his name written on the toy, the same name as my son, completely broke me. Two years later, I still haven't recovered from that single image.

And yet, today, we were in the emergency room because my son was struggling to breathe. I was calm and functioning. If I had seen something like this on the news or in a movie, I wouldn't have been able to keep watching.

It's strange how the mind works.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkey%E2%80%93Syria_eart...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake

Sometimes it's easy to keep it together when you have to focus on something critical and hard to keep it together when you're safe and can drop your guard. Hope he's doing well.

Yes, looks like that. He's doing fine today, thanks for asking.

Herodotus, in ancient Greece, had already said: "After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons."

A long time ago I saw Eric do a presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle on something like Designing for People in Crisis. He used his trip with his daughter Rebecca to the emergency room as the example of why it's crucial to have a section of your hospital webpage for people in crisis that is very easy to read and very easy to use in case of shock, trauma and emergency. Things like phone numbers and emergency room drop directions/maps.

I was familiar with Eric's work at the time, but the vulnerability he showed in using his own tragedy as an example of why websites should be, essentially, accessible for people in various states of trauma and crisis was incredibly moving and made the case for accessible design in a personal, powerful way.

This would be a really good read if anything like it exists somewhere. Do you have notes, more to say, a direct link to relevant work, anything?

My notes are long gone, but it looks like Eric took some here: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2016/01/25/designing-for-...

And it appears that this is the talk itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyZq6v3vZqo

It's amazing how dated the talk seems even though it's only 10 years old.

The talk references an insurance website that requires a Java applet for uploading a file. Last time I neede

It also praises Hipmunk for its ease of use. SAP bought hipmunk and shutdown the website in 2020. see https://www.concur.com/en-us/concur-hipmunk-faq

update: reddit had a couple of suggestions for alternatives - https://www.reddit.com/r/Flights/comments/13uqmba/website_wi...

Not sure if there's a comparable or better flight-booking site these days.

The CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) website looks more modern/cleaned up.

The Design For Real Life book is available to read for free on the web - see https://dfrlbook.com/

Context: This is remembering his daughter, Rebecca. (2008-2014)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer#:~:text=In%20201...

I came across the new CSS logo and thought the color looked about right (it's rebeccapurple), and ended up reading Eric's blog as a result.

Eric Meyer's blog post about why it should be called 'rebeccapurple' - see https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/06/19/rebeccapurple/

>For almost twelve hours, she was six

This is an incredibly poetic, heartbreaking statement.

Devastating and beautiful

a late tl;dr (more background for the above quote):

     "...A couple of weeks before she died, Rebecca informed us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old, and Becca was a baby name.  Once she turned six, she wanted everyone (not just me) to call her Rebecca, not Becca."

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.

I made the mistake of reading it with my baby kid sleeping in the next room. I am not normally religious, but I'm probably going to say at least a few prayers before bed tonight.

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.

I started reading from the beginning, and by the time I got to the post about her cancer recurring, and her parents having to tell her that she's going to die, I was sobbing.

Had to take a break. Not sure I can go back to it.

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.

Yup, B-all.

He hit all the goals so I know the relapse chances are vanishingly small.

Doesn’t change my anxiety though.

Stay strong my friend. The world is more beautiful with your son here, and I hope it stays beautiful for a very long time.

I have such a deep appreciation for Eric sharing his grief and journey through it. I only know who Eric is because of his amazing contributions to nerdy things I've thought about and appreciated for more than half my life. But his writing about of his journey with his daughter had changed me long before I was a father. And now that I am, I can barely make it through reading this.

Outside of the long term affects his family has had on my life, he reminds me that we used to write publicly, sometimes anonymously, for one another outside of social enclaves and directly affect one another without expectations of a like or subscribe or whatever makes the thing go brrrr.

This is deeply moving.

I have 3 kids. One is adopted, but he is no different from the others.

If anything happened to any of them, I sincerely can't imagine how I'd carry on. I know I would, but I don't know what it would look like. I can't imagine that world because I so badly don't want it.

Sometimes I force myself to imagine myself getting a terminal illness or injury, and think of how I'd handle that, how I need to live as though that could happen at any moment, and how important it is that I do that for my family. That's not so difficult. But when I come to the sort of mental simulation of my kids dying, I'm made sorely aware of how unprepared I'll be. As you can't easily prepare for their arrival, I don't think you can prepare for their departure.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations something like "When you kiss your child, whisper to yourself: 'Tomorrow you may be dead.'", which sounds extremely morbid, but (especially in his time) is something we unfortunately do need to consider and contemplate. Not only for ourselves, but our entire families. Someone needs to be able to guide the family through that, somehow.

I don't know how Eric met that challenge, but evidently he has (and continues to) and I admire anyone who does. That's an extremely hard path to be pushed down. To share pieces of that with other people is tremendously vulnerable and, in a sense, generous. I appreciate it.

If one is adopted but no different why even mention it?

I think because despite not knowing him for the first 5 years of his life, he has come to be so integral to my life and I find it profound and important. Without adding that context it does seem arbitrary and strange to mention. My relationship with him is very meaningful in that regard, so I suppose it occurred to me to mention it. Even without that bond normally formed in those early years, I'd be absolutely devastated if something happened to him.

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

I'm worried this will come across as cavalier and non-serious, but your comment reminded me a lot of ... yes, a comedy skit: Bo Burnham's White Woman's Instagram, in which he ostensibly makes fun of clichéd social media content, only to completely whip you about by briefly interrupting the cheese with the character's heartfelt post about living with her mother's death, perhaps the reason she needs the escapism of her online identity. And after it all you realize he told her entire life story in a series of comedy vignettes. I'm not ashamed to say I watched it in the right sort of mood and it moved me to tears (having lost a parent).

The entire Inside special is so deeply moving AND hilarious.

Welcome to the Internet is more applicable now than ever

That Funny Feeling is like a millennial version of We Didn't Start the Fire (and I have to be careful when I listen to it, because "that funny feeling" is difficult to cope with some times)

All Eyes on Me shook me to the core when I first heard it

I'm sometimes stressed about something stupid and come here out of muscle memory; just trying to fill my brain with another thing for at least a few minutes. Every now and again there's a post like this one that reminds me the thing I was trying to avoid is actually a problem someone else might be happy to trade with me. It usually makes me turn back toward my own problems with a little more gratitude.

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!

Just wait until AI can feel pain- you know it will happen eventually when they have physical sensors and enough compute.

You're right. The sad thing to me is there's not going to be much of a way to tell if the text we're reading, the picture we're looking at, or the person we're talking to even IS a real person unless they're physically in front of us.

It's a huge loss for interpersonal connectivity at a distance

I hear this a lot, but why is it a problem? For most people I encounter ephemerally online, as long as I can't tell the difference, it doesn't matter. If you were an AI, I wouldn't mind. I usually talk to such people to try to understand ideas better and if an AI could provide that, then no problem. If you want some sort of real-world interaction with them, there's a good chance that'll never happen with a real person either. I've had many online friends who I never met but I still felt like I knew them. The AI just has to be good enough never to burst the bubble.

Then there's the opposite problem that we already have to deal with - real people who are effectively AI and not capable of forming a mutual relationship with you, such as narcissists, people with dementia, and celebrities. People can spend years of their lives having a relationship where the other person only really exists in their own mind. Actually it's quite normal to build an internal imaginary model of the people we know which might not actually be correct.

but AI is telling you what 'people' think-- not a person-- but a blended up mismash of people, like the move Dark City, then strapped into a torture chair to diminish wrongthought. But it's people. or peopleish. It was made by people at least. sorta.

Besides, after being filtered through perception and narration who is to say any story you hear from another person is real?

Shouldn't it be more a question of what it does for you? And if some amorphous nonphysical branding of Realness(tm) and Authenticity(tm) is what you value most, then ultimately someone is marketing to that. And paradoxically it means that the most "real" stuff won't tend to be real at all.

So I think ultimately the only thing real is going to be the stuff you experienced yourself or comes from acquaintances you know well enough to know when they're not being earnest. I hope won't be so bad, after all it was the condition of all humanity until not so many years ago.

There's a reason the phrase, "Designed by committee", is not a praise. It applies to AI, too.

I don't want a mash-up of generic human thought, as filtered through a machine. I want to hear what people think, as individuals.

But there's no reason it can't emulate that. What people themselves think is mostly just a mashup of the crap they hear from other people anyway. It's also usually filtered for wrongthink, at least until they get to trust you enough.

I had this realization of how fake most people are when I started to use AI to talk online with people from a real-life-group I belonged to. I got it to talk the way they did and they liked it more than the real me. I then realized they're probably all just applying their own meat-AI filter to their own words anyway and not actually exposing their real feelings. I also know people who carefully draft and craft all their text and email messages to convey the feelings they want to show, whether they're honest or not.

I know how you feel. Tomorrow is my late son's ninth birthday.

So sorry for your loss.

My twins just turned 10 yesterday. But they were born as part of a triplet pregnancy... Life is just brutal, and I don't know if there is any solace in it being so brutal to so many other people. But I hope you're ok.

So sorry

Life’s greatest, least rewarding challenge; continuing to live when a loved one cannot.

To put that in context, when my grandparents were born, a typical family had around four children, and one in four children did not live to the age of five.

It is sort of crazy to think of what it would be like to grow up in that world.

I think a modern USA 1 year old has about a 99.97% chance of making it to adulthood. That means that if a modern USA adult loses a young child, there's a decent chance they don't know anybody who has had that experience.

The ancient (and even, as you point out, very slightly pre-modern) world had a lot of "infrastructure" in place to deal with this, there were rituals and ceremonies and familiar people who knew what you were going through, and most of that is gone now.

It is indeed an enormous change.

It's not gone. It's just less common, and, at least in my experience, hidden inside churches where people are open about this sort of thing, and where, in a lot of them, miscarriages are treated as much the same thing, to be grieved over, as loss. Sometimes in private, but it's better when it's shared, because others have gone through the same thing, suffering silently.

But you're right, it's far harder to go through an experience alone, and loss of a child has certainly become far, far less common than it used to be. At least, if you limit it to the born.

In the US, in 2023, 1 in 3 never made it to birth.

A few years ago I read of a pioneer woman in the Dakota region in the late 19th Century who had fifteen children, of whom 9 survived to adulthood. I can't begin to imagine the pain, and the fortitude needed to survive so much tragedy. As a parent, I can't think of anything worse than to lose one's child.

Related. Others?

CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapurple` - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42161919 - Nov 2024 (184 comments)

Adding 'rebeccapurple' color to CSS Color Level 4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7924677 - June 2014 (25 comments)

In memory of Rebecca Alison Meyer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863890 - June 2014 (69 comments)

The Truth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524028 - April 2014 (1 comment)

The Choice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7013747 - Jan 2014 (1 comment)

Based on the dates of comments to the featured blog post, the "new CSS logo featuring rebeccapurple as the background color" is a related post.

CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapurple` - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42161919 - November 2024 (184 comments)

Added above. Thanks!

I remember reading Eric's writing about Rebecca's illness and death at the time, and even though it was before my own daughter's birth I remember it being one of the saddest things I could remember reading. His writing is so eloquent that he really communicated the sadness and helplessness, while still managing to move on with his life. My deepest condolences.

I was just thinking today of my friend Donny Miceli, who died of childhood leukemia at the age of 7. I wondered what it would be like to be Donny's mom or dad. There would be sadness of course, and the devastating feeling that something was missing that should be there. Would there be guilt? How could they carry on, knowing that there was a high school graduation, wedding, etc. that they should have attended but weren't? I don't recall if Donny had siblings but if he did, how would they have felt growing up without him?

In 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.

Last year during summers, I lost one of the pillars of my life to Cancer, my grandfather. The loss felt as extreme disturbance, sharp pain and regret about not being there for him, not fulfilling my responsibilities.

I spent months feeling like a reason for this loss. The last few days of his life were painful, at least that's what I remember my parents telling me. He called out my name the night before he left, asking me to help him, I got to know. He wanted the pain to go away, a man who never asked for anything his whole life was crying for help. What still hurts is the thought that his pain was so unbearable that he gave up. He gave up his trust in himself, his family and me. I felt responsible for that. This image imprinted in my memory for so long. Every time, I thought of him, this is what came up.

After months of cursing myself, I realised that he may still be alive. Not in the reality I am having these thoughts, but in some other reality. His reality where his consciousness stays. Where he observes and not necessarily me. And that's the reality he is alive in. I found solace in the realisation that people never die. If we consider all possible realities generated each moment based on the decisions made, then there'll be at least one reality where he stays alive. We extend this logic and infer that at each moment out of all the possibilities, at least in one the man stays alive.

This even though not proven, gives a sense of relief and happiness. It is similar to blind faith, but the one that makes the most sense to me. And I am happy for my grandfather, that he's living his life, whichever reality he's in.

I love you, dadaji. <3 And I miss you in this reality.

We may all come from different cultures and generations but this loss hits deep in the same way for everyone. When I was a kid, I remember thinking my grandparents were very odd. They’d wake up everyday at 4 am. Grandpa would walk barefoot to the temple in their neighborhood and spend the next 2 hours singing to the deities there, gently waking each one up, washing and dressing them for the day. Grandma would send hand made goodies (food) as an offering with him.

They both spoke very little through their life. Mostly smiled, never heard them say anything bad about anyone, indulge in any material pleasures. Though I got affection from them, there was also always a sense of detachment from both.

As I grew up I learnt that they had lost their youngest son when he was 5 to a snake bite. They carried the burden of not protecting him for a decade while spiraling into depression and only these rituals slowly started giving them some stability back. This was a full 40-50 year time span. As a 40 year old myself I marvel at their strength to live out their lives, also during times where you couldn’t even reach out to internet for support.

I have a daughter who is now five years old. Until recently, I would have certainly killed myself if she had died. Without hesitation, I would have run to the nearest bridge and jumped. Continuing without her, bearing the constant grief, would have been completely pointless. I felt this way even after my twins, her siblings, were born. My feelings for them during their first 18 months or so were nothing compared to those for her. I knew that losing one of them would devastate me, but at least I would still have had my oldest daughter, and that's what really mattered deep down.

It's only recently, in the past six months or so, that I feel it would somehow be possible to live on even if something happened to my eldest. The reason for this is certainly that I finally love the little ones just as much as her.

I don't know if the author had other children besides the daughter he lost. If not, then I wonder where he found the strength or even reason to move on.

He has an older daughter and a younger son (in relation to Rebecca, before she passed).

He mentions in one of the blog posts after Rebecca's death that he and his partner try to be there, in the moment, for their two kids, though it may be difficult emotionally/mentally - like when his son entered kindergarten at the same school as Rebecca had done just a few years earlier.

From a Japanese song Kurumi

If only time could wash everything away, 時間が何もかも洗い連れ去ってくれれば

a life would be truly easy 生きる事は実に容易い

Reading this, sitting next to my 6 year old son, my ears tear up and I’m reminded to cherish every moment. Truly saddened by these kinds of stories and just how quickly it could happen to any of us.

Just thinking about it gives me very strong anxiety. I had to sit next to my daughter, she's sleeping and breathing.

Sometimes 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 bad, nothing is very good, meh. But what is the human experience except the dynamic range of emotion, rightly felt? We have a perpetual recentering, and without sorrow, without grief, there can be no true joy, because they are in the contrast. Endless joy would just become normal.

> It's found in Jesus, and the life-on-life community known as the Church.

Do you realize how incredibly dismissive it is for people to talk about the pain they feel, and to have someone respond "nah, you just haven't found Jesus yet"?

I was raised in a deeply religious household. I found no peace in Jesus. I'm happy that Christianity works for you, but this is not globally applicable advice. It's also an example of spiritual bypassing.

You're free to share a more general answer, should you have one.

And I'm free to share the answer I've found, even as I'm working through the challenges of life.

I've no idea what "spiritual bypassing" even means.

I don't think there IS a general answer. That's the entire crux of the matter.

You've found an "answer" in fairy tales, and think that gives you the right to dismiss other people's pain. Shame on you.

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.

> 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.

And about one percent of the women around you have survived an ectopic pregnancy because we're still (mostly) a society that cares more about the life of a breathing, thinking person than of an embryo that was doomed from the moment it landed outside of the uterus.

I'm part of that one percent. I regularly say a prayer of thanks for the doctors and nurses who (mostly metaphorically, but one physically) held my hand and explained what had gone wrong, how I could deal with it in a way that would preserve our chances to try again with as little risk to me as possible. I thank God that I was in a country with the resources and the legal apparatus for me to deal with my disappointment quickly and safely.

And I'm thankful for the child who I was able to bear nearly a decade later.

I don't judge anyone for the abortion they felt was the best of their hard options. I theoretically would have been left until I was bleeding out in many countries [0], and even my own home state doesn't quite feel safe now.

[0] No, I wouldn't. I'm a well-off American woman who can fly to somewhere rational, and worst case, am good friends with several MDs.

I am glad it helps you, but the amount of pain inflicted in the name of religion and gods in this world makes your assertion naive, to put it politely.

As a fellow believer, I need you to understand that you are doing more than any hardcore, argumentative atheist to turn people away from Christ by posting like this.

The only source of this pain is procreation. The father grieves the loss of his child, which he created. The child would have died after him anyway, is it okay then? When he doesn't see?

I am not dismissing his feelings, just want to state that we all create this pain ourselves. It's time to break the cycle

There isn’t really anything to say.

I can’t imagine losing a child.

I had a friend die suddenly a few years ago. He was a really influential person growing up.

You go around thinking, oh I’ll catch up later or reply another time and suddenly you can’t. I’ve lost a number of people over the years, but for some reason that friend in particular has been a difficult one to get over.

Once in a while I contemplate my own, and my children's mortality. On these occasions I tend to be more present with them, be more patient, and express my love.

It is heartbreaking to realize that you're one person breaking too late, one virus, one genetic lottery bad luck away from tragedy. That's also essential to remember that we're sitting on a very unstable equilibrium. The default state of things is broken and dead, and, at the risk of sounding cliché, every minute of "normal" life is something to be grateful for.

We're not exposed to death enough, and people sharing their experiences this way are helping us remember it's still there, in a way that helps empathize and understand. So, thanks.

Live long enough, and a few things will happen;

What you thought important as a child seems laughable as an adult.

What you found painful never leaves you.

What you lose can shackle you to what is no more, never to be resolved, by definition moments in the past which no longer exist and are forever out of reach.

  A decade ago, I said that I felt the weight of all the
  years she would never have, and that they might crush me.
  Over time, I have come to realize all the things she never
  saw or did adds to that weight.  Even though it seems like
  it should be the same weight.  Somehow, it isn’t.

  I was talking about all of this with a therapist a few days
  ago, about the time and the losses and their accumulated
  weight.  I said, “I don’t know how to be okay when I failed
  my child in the most fundamental way possible.”

  “You didn’t fail her,” they said gently.

  “I know that,” I replied. “But I don’t feel it.”

  A decade, it turns out, does not change that.  I’m not sure
  now that any stretch of time ever could.

As @imchillyb in this thread notes:

  Time is distance. How many miles the train will travel from
  the station. Distance grants perspective and removes
  immediacy.

Here, this can only be true if we give ourself permission to "board the train", to free oneself from the shackles of loss, of guilt, of blame, to accept that time does not destroy the memory of where we were or who we were with.

This blog is not for everyone.

It is a journey into the mind of a man experiencing grief for the loss of his daughter.

I wish that this man can find peace.

In the end, the mortality rate of everyone alive is 100% and the best we have is celebrating being alive while it lasts.

Well this was an unexpectedly and horrendously heartbreaking story to find.

It never occurred to me to lookup the creator of the tool[1] that I used to use so often. It's so easy to overlook that there are actually humans with their own story (tragic or not) behind the tools that we use. I should learn to appreciate people behind the code more. And, I'm so sorry what you had to and are going through, Mr. Meyer.

[1]. https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/

Having lost a child a few hours after birth I cannot imagine the pain that comes from raising a child and having them taken away. Losing my daughter was hard enough.

I lost my son, my firstborn, Nathan, over 30 years ago. He contracted encephalitis when he was 2 1/2 weeks old, and died when he was 2 1/2 months old. That was an experience I would not wish on the worst person in the world. That feeling of helplessness, and the overwhelming desire to swap places, so he would no longer suffer. My then-wife & I went on to have another child, who is one of my best friends.

When I read these stories, I occasionally try to imagine how it would feel for any of my children to be not there. I can never get too far, just the beginnings themselves are too powerful for me. It is like cracking open the doors to a horrible world and simply peeking through the tiny gap is enough pain. Unimaginable how bad it is for those for whom it is a reality of every waking moment for the rest of their lives.

I have the same feelings. When I start to wonder, I instantly have teary eyes and have to stop myself from thinking about it. I just can’t. It must be hell.

I read all entries about Rebecca last night after reading this one. It is such a visceral and devastating chronicle expressed in a beautiful way, it left me deeply moved.

I wonder how he felt after writing those words. I wonder if that beautiful ability to write what he feels so that many can feel a tiny glimpse of what he felt, helps to keep moving forward, even if a little bit.

Perhaps it is no consolation at all, but grief is beautiful when expressed with grace like this.

Also, I really like the design of this site.

I think it's terrible. I don't see a single positive thing about it. Even if shit is expressed in a graceful way, it's still shit. No grief would be beautiful

I don't have any kids, but I think about those kids in Gaza a lot. Maybe it's cause it felt like I was so helpless. I called offices. every day. The news media rejects our grief. The actual government rejects our grief and pays into the depravity. If I feel like this what does one of those parents that survived feel?

Not much on Hacker News has made me cry...

Facts

Flickr Photo Album for Rebecca Alison Meyer

https://www.flickr.com/photos/meyerweb/albums/72157645061445...

warning - the comments for the last page of photos - so heartbreaking.

Remembering Rebecca Alison Meyer - https://heightsobserver.org/read/2014/06/17/remembering-rebe...

One of Rebecca's godparents has a blog with related posts in the 2014-2015 timeframe.

see https://zoethe.livejournal.com/

Related: The “Hidden” Purple Memorial in Your Web Browser

https://medium.com/@valgaze/the-hidden-purple-memorial-in-yo...

This reminds me of Victor Hugo’s famous poem, “Demain, des l’aube,” about visiting his daughter.

I'm lucky to have avoided loss to this level for almost thirty years. I can't even imagine what it feels like. Thank you for sharing this, I'll hug my dog and partner extra hard.

Thank you for sharing such a deep and hurtful part of your life. I'm sorry for your loss, I cannot imagine what it feels like.

People say time heals all wounds but sometimes there’s simply not enough time left to heal certain wounds.

Time cannot heal.

Time is a tumbler, our feelings the rocks within.

Feelings begin as jagged, cutting, things. Time smooths and polishes the the edges, highlights unseen aspects. Time gives us perspective and distance.

No wound is ever fully healed. There remain scars and imperfections small pieces of us that never return to 'normal' again.

Time is distance. How many miles the train will travel from the station. Distance grants perspective and removes immediacy.

Time can't heal though. Time doesn't exist. We made it up in order to make more sense of our universe.

There is only now.

I started watching Paradise, and a grieving parent said "time just keeps taking me further away from when I was with them."

I would just tell them it’s also taking them closer to when they’ll be reunited.

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.

This is when I wish humans were not simulation machines. So much pain caused by that damn brain of ours.

The longer you carry the dead with you, the longer they cannot rest. Let them go. They would not want to see you suffer in their name.

easier said than done!

The government should provide a fund for people who have experienced child loss so they never have to work again.

Work might be the only distraction they have.

That would create a horrible perverse incentive to kill children for money.

Or fake their death, and lavish attention (and cash) on them until a couple of decades later the government notices they exist, it would be an interesting demographic.

Oh you sweet innocent summer child. Never change you glorious sunray.

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