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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
God thats poignant :( Glad you said that for me to keep tho
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
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.
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.
> 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;
HTHIn the present, orthodox practitioners of Abrahamic religions, in particular, may stoically overcome such profound grief by attributing it to divine will.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
Because random tragedy doesn't know or care about how good or bad you are. It just strikes, randomly, without direction.
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.
Or: Or: HTH0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
Let's hope the impact of RFK Jr on US health and vaccination of children won't be too big.
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.
And it appears that this is the talk itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyZq6v3vZqo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer#:~:text=In%20201...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
It's a huge loss for interpersonal connectivity at a distance
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
It is sort of crazy to think of what it would be like to grow up in that world.
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.