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.

Life pro-tip: In your day-to-day human encounters, if someone mentions the pain of losing a child, do not bring up your dead dog.

Don't you think he doesn't know that? Pro-tip for you: when someone mentions the pain of losing their companion, do not give them pro-tips.

tbf to GP, in some cultures dogs are abhorred.

> Life pro-tip: In your day-to-day human encounters, if someone mentions the pain of losing a child, do not bring up your dead dog.

Witnessing a cherished part of your life die, while you do not and can do nothing about it, is a uniquely powerless experience. Because, while you continue to live, a part of you dies.

If a person can empathize with this experience in a genuine way, what matter is it their loss?

How about we don't gatekeep or make a contest out of suffering, which is a subjective experience?

How can someone be around since 2007 and act like this ?

I think this scolding behaviour is really out of place. The guy is saying "a much lesser loss caused me great hurt; I sympathize with your much greater loss and the hurt you must feel". People do this all the time normally, and secondarily humans have imprecisely expressed feelings all the time and the spirit has usually undone any harm that the worst interpretation of the words could do. But at some point in the early 2010s this scolding behaviour started getting really popular. I wonder if some sociologist has traced its source. It's obviously nonsensical behaviour to me.

If someone did that in front of me I'd probably be compelled to say "Dude, now is not the time for this" or something like that but I can't imagine any person in my group behaving that way.

Ah, people shouldn’t scold others for saying something they find inappropriate. And you feel so strongly about this that you’d do the same thing.

I’ve just had a very close and traumatic loss myself. I can assure you that in some cases, a poorly chosen comparison of grief can have the opposite of the intended effect.

It’s a tough one, because the grieving mind isn’t particularly rational. You have to be especially careful of things that would otherwise be completely fine.

Much of it comes down to wanting real empathy -regardless of where their understanding of loss comes from. What isn’t desired is any kind of equivocation or comparison. And that is so dependent on how the message is delivered.

And I’ve lost dogs too, that can be absolutely devastating, so intellectually I get it, but the point still stands.

Thanks for sharing that. I'd think that the slight lean towards the fact that we're here discussing loss rather than meeting at a funeral makes it different, but I'll vary my view slightly. It's not a comparison I'd ever make because to me pets are pets and animals are not human. So I'll alter my view to not call out a scold on this topic in future in response to your comment.

I have lost both a daughter and a dog.

I believe your intentions here are good, but I don't recommend trying to rank various types of grief.

Past a certain threshold, all kinds are both the same and incomparable.

Stay strong.

You're effectively invoking Ring Theory - https://speakinggrief.org/get-better-at-grief/supporting-gri... - which I think is a strong foundation for navigating grief and distress.

But I don't think it's a valid criticism here because OP actively calls out they trying to find the most appropriate path for empathy ("support in") while deliberately not equating the two experiences of grief (avoiding "complain in").

> 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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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 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 they love when burden that 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 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."