In memory of Rebecca Alison Meyer
meyerweb.com
meyerweb.com
I don't know Eric, but I do know he's going to be going through an incredibly difficult period. My friends helped me out, but time and reflection helped much more. I was lucky to be in a situation where I could take an extended period to grieve.
I hope Eric and his family is able to wade through this all with the absolute minimum of additional pain, but nothing about it will be easy.
Eric, if you're reading this, hang in there... you'll never have your old life entirely back (and I say this with tears in my own eyes now), but time really can help heal over bad wounds.
Faith is incredibly important to me and making my life one that counts. Life is precious and we shouldn't take it for granted. We need to discover the fun in life and live for those around us.
It does get better but they are ever present and I am glad. But man it just SUCKS still all the same.
Source: I lost my 3 y/o daughter to cancer as well. It's every parents worst nightmare and the ensuing darkness that comes over you after losing a child has got to be the deepest sort of depression there is. I had an easier time going to war, losing friends, and re-integrating into society with severe PTSD than I did dealing with the first year after Layla died.
If you know the Meyers, please, just be a presence and let them draw off a little bit of emotional energy from time to time.
Do write to them even, if you struggle to find words.
Do tell them you are thinking of them. It does help.
Don't avoid mentioning Rebecca for fear of reminding them: there is 0% chance that they will have forgotten, even ten years from now. They need to know she hasn't been forgotten by the world, too. The occasional "Rebecca would have loved this" is perfect.
Don't whisper. Dead children aren't secrets.
Yes, you can laugh: there is still joy and all children are silly.
Never, ever grab them by the elbow and talk to them with you head tilted sideways (that drove me mad!).
Warning: I am constantly looking for any opportunity to mention my son and I am duty bound to include him an any headcount or history or whenever a new family face is born. If The Meyers do this, please try not to look shocked each time.
Yes, this is a huge point. Different families grieve differently, and how one properly memorializes their dead children is a problem I would wish on no one.
I have a picture of my deceased daughter on my desk next to pictures of my sons, which occasionally leads to awkward conversations, but I would rather have poignant and painful memories than to try to erase it all.
My wife will try to include a picture of her in current family photos, which always sounds weird to my friends—but I know exactly why my wife does it.
I hesitated to put a list of "ways you can help" since Eric (and his family!) might grieve differently, but I will say that each and every single item on this list I would have (and do) find helpful for my situation as well.
Tragically his daughter passed away today. You can read some of Eric's heartbreaking writings about it here: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/cancer/
He's also quite actively tweeting before and after the passing, some of the tweets bringing tears to my eyes: https://twitter.com/meyerweb
Today’s MRI showed that the CT scan two weeks ago was inaccurate.
That's really upsetting to me.
I thought the stress of going from two to three kids was overwhelming, but it was nothing compared to the stress of going from three to two.
RIP
The complexity of 'erasing cancer' is very much mis-understood, even though it is of course a noble goal.
The biggest issue I think is that cancer is systemic, given a long enough run the way our bodies do their housekeeping cancer is pretty much a 100% certainty. It's like playing the lottery, if you play long enough one day you'll win, only in this case you lose.
By far the larger part of the fatalities in my close circle were due to cancer. And I fear that this will remain with us as a problem for quite a while. Compared to curing cancer curing world hunger seems to be easy (it requires no unknown technology, nor does it go against the way our bodies appear to function).
I think in retrospect that my normal dose of snark, even with the point I was trying to make, was probably not appropriate to the topic at hand. If nothing else it might seem flippant, and while I know that's not what I would mean, that doesn't mean people seeing the comment independently would realize that.
> The complexity of 'erasing cancer' is very much mis-understood, even though it is of course a noble goal.
If I had a do-over that's probably exactly how I would phrase it instead. Saying we should simply cure cancer, as it were always one massive public project away and just needed political will, just demonstrates an immature understanding of cancer research as it stands today.
Certainly it's a noble goal, but it's seemingly at odds with how biology works in a body in the long run.
Regarding biological viruses, your comment seems to assume that all viruses are detrimental to life.
http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/nucle...
The SENS Research Foundation is entirely supported by charitable donations.
If you want something a little less radical then helping any group working on targeted cell killing technologies is more useful than what you were probably going to do with that money otherwise - though of course finding a place to donate that will funnel your funds to this particular research is a challenge. The typical cancer charity is about five levels removed from picking research projects, but one can hope that this will change with the spread of crowdfunding techniques into the sciences. Immune therapies are the front runner technology there, but many other approaches exist (nanoparticles, viruses, bacteria, etc). Some of these approaches seem likely to effectively treat many different types of cancer, such as work on CD47:
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2012/03/one-drug-shrink-al...
Even if we do it one disease at a time, it'll be worth it.
How about less then 1% from American Cancer Society go to peds Research
How about 4% of Federal dollars for cancer research goes to peds cancer research
Vast majority of organizations give for the care and expenses BUT NOT to fund peds cancer research.
Good organizations: St Baldricks, Children's Cancer Research Foundation, Alex's Lemonade Stand, and other's if they state Research is a certain percentage if not it is pennies to the dollar.
Pediatric cancer is exceptionally rare. The ACS figures[1] for this year estimate 1,350 childhood cancer deaths out of 585,720 total deaths, or 0.2%. The prime driver for cancer research fund allocation is incidence rate. You are far more likely to develop cancer aged 20-40 than you are aged 0-20. 12% of all women will develop invasive breast cancer at some point in their lives.
I am not saying there isn't an argument for increasing pediatric cancer research: the question is whether a disease that has a very low incidence rate should get extra funding at the expense of a disease with a comparatively high one. I don't know the answer, and I don't pretend to. I do think cancer research funding is a very complicated matter, and inevitably one group of people is going to end up angry and upset at the expense of another.
[1]: http://www.cancer.org/research/cancerfactsstatistics/cancerf...
20+ years ZERO new chemotherapy drugs introduced to pediatric cancer treatments. We can do better. TO bad the cancer that killed my son has more research spending for dogs then there is for adults and children of bone cancer. Priorities!
We are up against a couple number of entrenched public companies like Sigma-Aldrich and Thermo Fisher.
Couple of examples:
Greiner CELLSTAR® serological pipette, 10 mL $27 v. $106.60
http://store.p212121.com/serological-pipettes/
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/sigma/p7615?lang...
TCEP HCl $89 vs. $365
http://masschallenge.org/startups/2014/profile/3derm
3Derm takes 3D pictures of skin with an inexpensive handheld imager to help detect skin cancer at the earlier more treatable stages.
http://masschallenge.org/startups/2014/profile/oncolinx
Oncolinx cancer therapies can target and destroy cancer cells, while sparing healthy tissues—effectively treating the cancer, virtually without any adverse side affects.
There are others that are more general than just cancer.
this forum sees legacy individuals passing on, near by contributors passing on, and in instances like this one, a young life taken from us. i don't mean to be harsh or question, but given the community losses, i've seen long term contributors to technology relegated to the dustbin where stories like this are in the top couple for some time.
It all sucks, but the "dynamics" cause me concern.
Eric, my deepest condolences.
The loss of a child is profound - and as you can see there are others here who have also gone through the loss of their child. The python programmer who lost a child might skip over all of the php posts here, but posts like this can let that person reach out the the Meyer family. The parents who posted on there loss, also are giving the rest of us valuable advice when we might not know what to do but would like to reach out.
When people who are older and have had full lives pass away, in general, as a community we know what to do. When children die, many times we are at a loss.
The other reason I would like to see posts like this remain high in the rankings - is because to outsiders - some people summarize the lot of programmers into the myopic no social skills bucket. This is generally incorrect - but if someone sees this, and it gives them from sending the "Dude when are you going to update your reset" tweet I think it is worth it.
I'm one of three of my parents' children. My sister, the youngest, was killed at 16 July 31, 2013. My parents are devastated to this day, almost a year later.
Eric wrote, "I thought the stress of going from two to three kids was overwhelming, but it was nothing compared to the stress of going from three to two."
That's what my parents have been expressing throughout the past 10 months. My mother still says she has three children, so does my father, and I still--without skipping a beat--say that I have two sisters.
Eric, if you're reading this, I guess I'm just saying two things: 1) You're not the only one going through it, and you can feel free to reach out to someone who might be able to identify with you; 2) I encourage you to refer to your family as whole because of the impact your daughter made on your family's life as a unit.
Keep your head up, please. I truly, truly, truly feel for you.
* A big life can be very short.
* Losing a child is normality, it's just not modern, western, normality.
It's important not to dwell on the bad stuff. We are programmed to forget it and remember only the good stuff so while my memories have gotten lesser as the years have passed they have become better & more concentrated.
I've also learned to not ask "why me?" — and instead ask "why not me?". Most of history's parents have probably lost a child so the idea that "this isn't supposed to happen" seems a little selfish to me. All those cherubs painted on walls probably have real faces.
These days, I like to think that my boy was simply let into the big secret a little early.
Imagine what we could accomplish if capital/compute/mindpower resources were reallocated from showing me ads to solving something I cared about. Can we not have another cab/delivery/ad/food delivery/message/social text/video/short video/music network?
My deepest condolences to the Meyer family, I can't begin to fathom the pain and loss you must feel.
I can't even begin to reach the level of empathy and sympathy required to do Eric justice, but all I can say is sorry. I don't even know him that well but I feel like he's done so much for my career as a front-end developer that it just pains me as someone who is such a beacon for web gets such a tragic turn of events, probably the worst any parent could go through.
I'm sorry.
What a waste. Such a beautiful girl. Cancer really sucks.
I'm sorry to hear of the loss. I took care of a dying child for several months some years ago; he finally passed away while I was holding his hands one day, as the mission bells struck noon - 14th of September, 2007. My heart ached and ached, even though he was not my own. How much more so a parent. I will be praying for the family.
I'll certainly be praying for their family tonight. :-(
People just like you and me, zobzu.
lets honor and mourn the death of those who we do not know personally but are related to well known public figures = pretty stupid in my eyes. feel good kind of crap.
At the very least, this is the acceptable social norm regardless of the other person's stature / social standing, is it not?
so, interestingly enough, what you're using as an argument is in fact the exact reason why this seems wrong to me ;)
Is this date actually correct? Perhaps trivial in the big scheme of things I suppose, but for me the additional karmic insult of her dying on her birthday, I think that might drive me over the edge.
B"DE