The most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a very long time!
I could relate to it though there are no photographs, but the memories and the moment are frozen forever! Some can never be replaced or compared against!
Thanks for sharing and bringing a tear drop around the corner of my eyes!
I teared up when the father passed away and actually cried at the empty driveway. What a beautiful expression of love. I wish I had done something similar when I had the chance. Thanks for sharing.
This made me cry. Being intimidated by the temporality of relationships but also stunned at how beautiful goodbyes can be.
I had seen these photos before and saw them return to reddit during the past few days. Couldn't click on them until now, because I was afraid of the emotions they would surface.
Right now I’m on a train from southern Poland to north-western Germany, about 1200 kilometres apart, after visiting my family, as I do about twice a year, and going back to where I live and work. My parents have both passed 60 recently. How many more such visits will I yet get to spend with them? Thank you for this submission, very well timed for me, and made me tear up a bit, but also made me appreciate my folks even more. It’s up to us to make the best of the time we and the people we love still have left with each other
We really don't appreciate how little time we get with our parents once we grow up and move away. It comes in snatches and moments, and then they are no more.
I wish I'd spent more quality time with mine while I could. I feel like I didn't start really talking to my dad until the last few years of his life. I didn't realise how much I had to ask them both until they were gone.
> I wish I'd spent more quality time with mine while I could
Absolutely! My parents were never always that healthy but would love a long walk and meander. I had a period where I didn't go home for a few years and when I finally saw them again it was shocking how much they'd declined. A couple more years since and now they can barely walk more than 10 meters without stopping in pain. Now it's so bad we can't even walk to a corner shop nearby. When I think back that only a few years ago I could've gone on a long walk through London with my father, it stings. Now it's a case of "what next" with their health.
Of course it seems like you have to learn this lesson "for real" for it to sink in, which is the sad bit about life...
I left Portugal and have been around other European countries since the early 2000's, also do similar trips back home, already lost many dear relatives including one of my parents, yes it hits hard, and makes one wonder how to sort out this kind of issues.
It is also one of the reasons why I no longer take jobs without remote option across Europe, not only the country where the company is located (naturally as long as I can afford to be picky).
The finality of death feels impossible to grasp. I think of this with my parents who are in their 90s and live on the other side of the world. I also think of it with my own children - how do you say goodbye when you’re the one leaving?
I love the story these photographs tell. I’m an avid archiver of our family’s photos.
The other thing I did was to interview my parents 20 years ago to document their life experience in one go from their perspective (separately, because they are different).
Maybe not everyone is a nostalgic, but for those of us who are - I encourage doing these things now. It’s never to late to start and they might bring comfort both today and when you wave your last goodbye.
> Maybe not everyone is a nostalgic, but for those of us who are - I encourage doing these things now.
Is not just for nostalgia. I would've loved if my parents recorded even just a few minutes of their grandparents or great-grandparents to pass them to my children.
You’re right. I have a video recording of a my grandparent talking on the porch of his home in India where my parents grew up. He was describing the elephants that roamed the area and how he and his siblings would help tend the land. Truly a treasured clip treasured if my children’s great grandparents.
I also am the avid family photo archiver (I scan them, tag them, release them).
The oldest photo I have is a tintype of a young girl around 1882 or so. She is maybe two years old — and is my great grandmother.
I never met her, she had died before I was born. But I have studied her in the photos going all the way back to that tintype of her — somewhere in Missouri. Photos show her with her sisters and parents not long before they died, working in the fields, married to my great grandfather, with her children. Her children become adults and at some point it is clear that the daughter's role has reversed and she is taking care of mom. Great grandmother is soon old and so frail looking. And then there is a photo of the headstone for her.
It has been a little sobering, as "photo historian" for the family, seeing the arc of lives lived and now gone.
Mind sharing your process? While my parents are still around, I want to digitize the hundreds of photos they have of the previous generations while we can still identify them. It seems like a daunting task!
I considered sending the prints to a company that scans them. I was in LA at one time and toured their offices. Ultimately, I decided to use Photo Scan (an iOS app by Google - not sure if it’s still around).
I grouped photos by general time range and bulk added date/time and location information - knowing it wouldn’t be perfect.
It wasn’t terrible and I got a couple hundred photos scanned in a weekend.
I have a EPSON flatbed scanner and use Apple's Image Capture to scan them in.
Smaller photos (3 x 5 or smaller) I scan at 600 DPI, larger (5 x 7 or larger) maybe 450 DPI or so. I'm trying to capture enough detail that I could reprint them, perhaps even larger than the original, and not have reached the pixel level.
I pull the scans into Apple's Photos and immediately tag them all with "Family Photos" keyword or similar to make finding them easier later.
Then it's adding keywords for who is in the photo (if I know). If anything was written on the front or back I type those in the Description. If I know the date I change the date of the photo. If I don't know the date at all I also keyword the photo "Wrong Date".
If I know the year I set the date to "1/1/YEAR". If I know the month and year (some Polaroids would print this on the border of the photo) I set the date to "MONTH/1/YEAR".
Sometimes the photo was labeled as someone's birthday or on Christmas so I can get the day as well.
Finally, I also edit the photos — adjust levels, remove scratches, etc. Again in Photos. I tend to only spend significant time on the important photos, or ones I like.
But as you said, daunting. Nonetheless, I can export the photos and send them around to family, post to Ancestry.com, etc. And all the metadata is retained on export.
I have retouched many photos such that I was able to print them and have a photo that was better than the surviving print (possibly even a touch better than the print when it was new).
It has been worth it for me. I have observed the changes in consumer camera quality, figured out who people are who were strangers to me before (I can recognize many now when I come across a photo I had not before seen).
A family photo I restored, my great grandmother is top-right (probably end of the 19th Century):
I finished digitalising my analog photos (that was only a few albums, I got a digital camera around 14 years of age) and sorted them then made both my mum (early sixties) and my grandma (mid eighties) a set on a digital photo frame (along with copies of some of my digital photos). Those frames are a bit pricy and will need a techie to setup, but the gifts were very well received.
I would have done that with my other grandma, but we grew apart and then dementia destroyed what was left of her. I will likely digitalize her photo collection when she is moved to a retirement home.
As others have said, you should also get their stories on camera on as a recording, if possible. There will come a time where this is no longer possible.
My grandparents died recently. They were born in the 1920s. Cleaning out their house I discovered countless letters, photo albums and diaries that I had no idea existed. I regret not asking them for permission to go through their stuff while they were still alive. I think they would have said yes - and there would have been many, many interesting conversations. I have read many biographies. But going through their things I can see how much there was to learn from them. And I did learn a lot from them - but some things just never came up, because they had forgotten and I didn’t know what questions to ask.
Growing up, my father was estranged from his family. My mother told me his mother and father emotionally and physically abused him. He moved out of the house at 15 and we only saw them twice a year. Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was usually a few hours and then we were shuffled out of there really fast. By contrast, my mother's family was huge, we had massive gatherings at almost every holiday and all the adults would play cards and chat and we'd be there for hours on end before leaving. My mother's side was a very close knit Scandinavian family.
One of the things I knew about my father was that he was avid stamp collector. He called me last year and told me it was time for him to give up his collection as his eyes were getting worse and he didn't have the concentration to catalog his stuff any more.
I came over on a Fall Sunday afternoon last year. He sat down with them and told a very long story about how he got into stamp collecting and about ten minutes in I realized this was something incredible. I had was about to get a rather long, involved history of his family which I never had known before. I took out my phone and turned on the live transcribe. We took several breaks going through his collection and some other stuff like coins he inherited from my grandfather on my Mom's side.
It was completely insane the story he told. His great grandfather was forced into the German military during world war one. He hopped off the troop train at the first stop and fled into the forest. He made his way to the coast where he jumped a steamship bound for the US. He was terrified the Germans were still after him so he continued West after landing in New York until he reached Minnesota. That was just the beginning of the story, but I am eternally grateful for being able to hear him tell so many crazy stories about his life and his family that I never knew. I've saved that transcription and will be sharing it with the rest of my family this Christmas.
I had the same reaction, all this stuff was just incredible that I never knew and had the very same feeling that there was so much I learned in those stories he told, so I am eternally grateful he shared that with me. For me, it was absolutely priceless. My wife has told me multiple times how fortunate I am I took the time to go see him and those stories were not on the list of things I expected to happen.
I’m sure where that story came from, there will be many more.
I’d recommend recording the audio instead of doing live transcription. You can always transcribe it later. Any transcription you run five years from now is probably going to be way more accurate than anything you can run on your phone today. Plus, this way, you also preserve his voice and any nuances.
I've been thinking about this too so thank you for the recommendation. I like the idea of having his voice and inflections in the way he tells a story that give the information way more depth.
I also wish I'd spent more time trying to get my parents to talk about the early parts of their lives. Only one grandmother lived until I was old enough to think of this, but I didn't think to do it with her either :(
Made me think of this bit from Tim Urban’s classic blog post, The Tail End[0]:
>It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
I was recently recommended the book The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. And while people who recommended this book said they had an epiphany moment reading it, all I saw there was a story of someone who's been served everything in their life on a silver platter. Someone who came to meet the literal end of their life, and yet grown no humility nor a bit of introspection... Until the last page I was waiting for the punchline. I wanted the author to admit that he was exceptionally lucky, that when things stopped being easy, he finally saw the light.
The missing punchline turned out to be much harder to swallow than anything author could probably come up with. The whole thing turned out to be the typical in academic circles foreword to "selected works", where the author desperately tries to mention every even marginally useful person in a vain hope that by stroking their ego, they'd increase their "impact factor".
One of the points in that book that came out as bizarre was when the author sought love advice from his parents... at the young age of thirty-something years old. The reliance on the parents, while doesn't play the key role, is still prominently featured throughout this self-styled epitaph.
* * *
I've only ever gotten to know one of my grandparents. My grandmother passed away when I was twelve. I have zero photographs of her. Nothing's left in the family to remind me of her. I don't know if my mother is alive. The last time we spoke I was sixteen. I have no idea if she still lives where she used to live when I left. And I have no interest in discovering what if anything's left of her. My parents split up when I was seven. Despite being a spiteful and abusive evil piece of shit who couldn't hold a job and had no means to sustain herself, let alone two children, my mom got full custody by the time it came to the family court. So, I grew without a father. I got briefly to know him by the time I was in high-school, but then I left to a different country.
Today we don't speak the same language, live worlds apart, and there are front-lines of a very hot and bloody war between us. I don't come to visit, and don't expect to be able to come to my dad's funeral.
People waxing emotional over having living parents who took part in their lives, who had something to contribute... kind of turn my stomach upside-down. They have no idea how good they have it, and yet they present their quite happy and fulfilling life as some kind of world-ending tragedy.
I am going to say something straightforward and possibly hurtful. I mean it seriously and respectfully.
Just because you have been damaged emotionally, does not invalidate other people's emotions. They are quite possibly feeling the lowest lows of their lives -- even if that low is a mountain pass versus your death valley. They still deserve respect in grief, even if overall they have had a wonderful life.
People are made of the same things. They aren't somehow incomparable.
Someone with living and attentive parents, who lived in good health to their nineties, lived in their own home, in a well-to-do country, where their child came to visit them, in their own car, in good weather, etc... what more did they expect to happen? This is the best outcome by far they could expect from life. They've won the lottery, what more do they want?
No. You completely misunderstood my point. I'm not "emotionally damaged". Overwhelming majority of people on planet Earth don't have it anywhere near as good as the people in OP or a bunch of people commenting here about their quite alive and quite well-to-do families. With all that happened to me, I'm still among the few percents who has it relatively well. Vastly more people in this world will have it worse than I have.
The entitlement of people crying about how bad they have it, when they are among the fraction of a percent of those who have it the best it can possibly be is what's so disgusting.
By your logic, nobody really has a right to be sad. There is always someone who had it worse. One is not 'entitled' [believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment] because they had a good family and grieve its loss. Nor should they feel guilty about that feeling.
to me this makes it all the more odd - at a glace the top level responses are about how the piece made them emotional/sad or are reminisces about their own parents.
What's wrong with that? Because these folks experienced the "best outcome" (presumably to see their parents live to old age) they shouldn't get emotional about it?
"Emotional" is the kind of half-truth word. There are many different emotions. The emotion in question is what's responsible for the response. Saying "emotional" is omitting the important part. It's like saying "involved in road accident" w/o saying whether one caused the said accident or was the victim of.
The top-level response in question is disgusting. It's like listening to someone who won a million dollars in a lottery complain that they didn't win ten millions. Should I really feel compassionate towards a "victim" of such a bad luck of only winning a single million? Even if the "victim" genuinely feels bad about themselves?
No one is asking for your compassion or complaining, they're largely just expressing how the piece made them feel - and again, reminiscing about their own parents.
you're characterizing them as ungrateful, which isn't really coming across for me at all.
Respectfully, this is kind of a shocking thing to read.
> People waxing emotional over having living parents who took part in their lives, who had something to contribute... kind of turn my stomach upside-down. They have no idea how good they have it, and yet they present their quite happy and fulfilling life as some kind of world-ending tragedy.
Good fortune can open oneself up to greater heartbreak, and misfortune can do the worse. Likewise, the opposite can happen: fortune can blind the fortunate, and enable happiness when the unfortunate overcome.
It goes all ways and directions. But for whatever hardship you have, you missed out on other sorts of hardship. And whatever hardships you dealt with, the author of any memoir may have missed those obstacles. Be at peace! And don't expect anyone to walk the same path as you.
I'm sorry you missed out on these experiences, but that doesn't mean that the normal experience of being a human - that is your parents living into your own adulthood - ought to be taboo.
I don't "have hardship". I don't struggle. With all that happened in my life, I'm still among the vanishingly small group of people who have it too good to complain.
Whatever your fortune or misfortune opens you to is only relevant if you are under... maybe twelve years old. As a grownup, you are expected to be able to put things into perspective and realize that complaining about a pea under twenty mattresses doesn't really make you into a princess.
> the normal experience of being a human - that is your parents living into your own adulthood
However common this is, it's not the point. The point is that people in this thread complain about the best outcome that is possible in this situation. These people complain about winning the lottery for crying out loud. How much more entitled can you get?
I'm sorry that having never had these relationships, you cannot comprehend the loss. In seeing this series and the comments, I see both the sweetness of the relationships and the hint of the grief at their passing.
Yes, we recognize that having loving parents is an immeasurable blessing. While their passing is not a world-ending tragedy, it is precisely because we know how precious that interaction is, that we mourn their passing - and encourage others who have it to treasure it.
But there are other precious relationships and interactions that we can establish, build, and treasure.
Oh but I do. There's no shortage of phony self-centered people in the world around me. Through a little effort and a ton of luck I ended up living and interacting with a lot of entitled people, obsessed with their petty tragedies which they hurry to encase in heavy golden frames and put on public display in the most prestigious art gallery in town.
I live in the world where about half the inhabitants don't eat meat out of "moral concerns" absolutely ignoring the grim reality of most of the world that will eat whatever food they have, and a lot of the time would have none.
People who protest about political causes in lands and cultures they don't understand because a propaganda ad featuring a bruised child in a pile of rubble made them feel sad.
People throwing themselves at the police at another pointless protest rally, only to be greeted at the police station by a mug of hot chocolate and be dispatched home to sleep in their soft and cozy beds.
There's nothing deep or special in this "loss". It make sense to mourn the loss of a life of a young man committing suicide because he was abandoned by the world around him. And I've seen that. It makes sense to mourn the loss of life of a young woman who got hooked up on heroin and died of overdose after an attempted recovery--and I've seen that too. It makes sense to regret the loss of young child's life, whose entire family was killed by poorly planned and poorly executed missile attack. Because such loss of life was avoidable, it took something that had a potential and squandered it. Old people dying of old age is nothing like any of the above. It's what's supposed to happen. It's how I want to go. It's how I want for everyone I care about to go.
I've spent enough time with ER to develop strong feeling of disgust for people who start crying "oh but my mom, she was only ninety-three!" and then latching onto the doctor's sleeves preventing them from tending to other patients. These also tend to show in large family groups and block the entire department for hours by driving attention to themselves with loud wining, arguing with the medical staff and other people in the ER. Demanding unlimited attention due to their "devastating loss". Demanding that the medical staff instantly produce all sorts of forms, perform all kinds of unnecessary procedures, basically, only to drive attention to themselves.
There’s no fairness to the audience you’ll have. Or they will have. Some people will experience a pebble in their shoe, tell the harrowing story, and people will hail them for the courage that they are showing. The openess. The hard-earned wisdom. And there’s nothing anything can do about that.
A few years ago I went through digitising all my grandmothers old albums. The final picture was my grandfather on his deathbed, she stopped making any albums after even though she was only 60. She died 2 yrs later. This hit me hard.
Beautiful. As I’ve grown older and moved back near my parents with my own family, this is something I think about every time we visit. I’m going to start taking some of these pictures.
I made a big move back near family that was hugely professionally disruptive to me (although beneficial for my partner). As time has gone on I've started to realize being away from family was weighing on me far more than I was aware of, especially with a new child.
Sometimes the move goes the other way. I have friends and extended family whose parents moved to be closer to them.
Every time I visit my parents (who live in another continent), every time we celebrate something together, every time we fight, I think to myself, "how would next time look like". I know for sure that some of them will be irredeemably different to the present. No amount of negative visualization may help me, I fear.
99 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadI could relate to it though there are no photographs, but the memories and the moment are frozen forever! Some can never be replaced or compared against!
Thanks for sharing and bringing a tear drop around the corner of my eyes!
Have a beautiful day!
Love from India!
I had seen these photos before and saw them return to reddit during the past few days. Couldn't click on them until now, because I was afraid of the emotions they would surface.
Impressive work.
Thanks for sharing.
I wish I'd spent more quality time with mine while I could. I feel like I didn't start really talking to my dad until the last few years of his life. I didn't realise how much I had to ask them both until they were gone.
Absolutely! My parents were never always that healthy but would love a long walk and meander. I had a period where I didn't go home for a few years and when I finally saw them again it was shocking how much they'd declined. A couple more years since and now they can barely walk more than 10 meters without stopping in pain. Now it's so bad we can't even walk to a corner shop nearby. When I think back that only a few years ago I could've gone on a long walk through London with my father, it stings. Now it's a case of "what next" with their health.
Of course it seems like you have to learn this lesson "for real" for it to sink in, which is the sad bit about life...
It is also one of the reasons why I no longer take jobs without remote option across Europe, not only the country where the company is located (naturally as long as I can afford to be picky).
All the best.
Well, It really doesn't matter where you are and I'm pretty sure you ain't one data center rat! :D
All that matters is how you chop onions and whether you chop it or not!
Fun apart, on a serious note, it did brought tears down the cheek.
And I'm not alone as I could see from many other comments and fellow hackers...
Love from India!
I love the story these photographs tell. I’m an avid archiver of our family’s photos.
The other thing I did was to interview my parents 20 years ago to document their life experience in one go from their perspective (separately, because they are different).
Maybe not everyone is a nostalgic, but for those of us who are - I encourage doing these things now. It’s never to late to start and they might bring comfort both today and when you wave your last goodbye.
Is not just for nostalgia. I would've loved if my parents recorded even just a few minutes of their grandparents or great-grandparents to pass them to my children.
promise to bring back something nice
I also am the avid family photo archiver (I scan them, tag them, release them).
The oldest photo I have is a tintype of a young girl around 1882 or so. She is maybe two years old — and is my great grandmother.
I never met her, she had died before I was born. But I have studied her in the photos going all the way back to that tintype of her — somewhere in Missouri. Photos show her with her sisters and parents not long before they died, working in the fields, married to my great grandfather, with her children. Her children become adults and at some point it is clear that the daughter's role has reversed and she is taking care of mom. Great grandmother is soon old and so frail looking. And then there is a photo of the headstone for her.
It has been a little sobering, as "photo historian" for the family, seeing the arc of lives lived and now gone.
I grouped photos by general time range and bulk added date/time and location information - knowing it wouldn’t be perfect.
It wasn’t terrible and I got a couple hundred photos scanned in a weekend.
Highly recommend this or another method.
I have a EPSON flatbed scanner and use Apple's Image Capture to scan them in.
Smaller photos (3 x 5 or smaller) I scan at 600 DPI, larger (5 x 7 or larger) maybe 450 DPI or so. I'm trying to capture enough detail that I could reprint them, perhaps even larger than the original, and not have reached the pixel level.
I pull the scans into Apple's Photos and immediately tag them all with "Family Photos" keyword or similar to make finding them easier later.
Then it's adding keywords for who is in the photo (if I know). If anything was written on the front or back I type those in the Description. If I know the date I change the date of the photo. If I don't know the date at all I also keyword the photo "Wrong Date".
If I know the year I set the date to "1/1/YEAR". If I know the month and year (some Polaroids would print this on the border of the photo) I set the date to "MONTH/1/YEAR".
Sometimes the photo was labeled as someone's birthday or on Christmas so I can get the day as well.
Finally, I also edit the photos — adjust levels, remove scratches, etc. Again in Photos. I tend to only spend significant time on the important photos, or ones I like.
But as you said, daunting. Nonetheless, I can export the photos and send them around to family, post to Ancestry.com, etc. And all the metadata is retained on export.
I have retouched many photos such that I was able to print them and have a photo that was better than the surviving print (possibly even a touch better than the print when it was new).
It has been worth it for me. I have observed the changes in consumer camera quality, figured out who people are who were strangers to me before (I can recognize many now when I come across a photo I had not before seen).
A family photo I restored, my great grandmother is top-right (probably end of the 19th Century):
https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2020/137/22136538_9c3c4...
And her again, in a tintype from about 1880 (sadly someone seems to have folded it in half in the 144 years since):
https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2019/113/19923761_08885...
I would have done that with my other grandma, but we grew apart and then dementia destroyed what was left of her. I will likely digitalize her photo collection when she is moved to a retirement home.
As others have said, you should also get their stories on camera on as a recording, if possible. There will come a time where this is no longer possible.
One of the things I knew about my father was that he was avid stamp collector. He called me last year and told me it was time for him to give up his collection as his eyes were getting worse and he didn't have the concentration to catalog his stuff any more.
I came over on a Fall Sunday afternoon last year. He sat down with them and told a very long story about how he got into stamp collecting and about ten minutes in I realized this was something incredible. I had was about to get a rather long, involved history of his family which I never had known before. I took out my phone and turned on the live transcribe. We took several breaks going through his collection and some other stuff like coins he inherited from my grandfather on my Mom's side.
It was completely insane the story he told. His great grandfather was forced into the German military during world war one. He hopped off the troop train at the first stop and fled into the forest. He made his way to the coast where he jumped a steamship bound for the US. He was terrified the Germans were still after him so he continued West after landing in New York until he reached Minnesota. That was just the beginning of the story, but I am eternally grateful for being able to hear him tell so many crazy stories about his life and his family that I never knew. I've saved that transcription and will be sharing it with the rest of my family this Christmas.
I had the same reaction, all this stuff was just incredible that I never knew and had the very same feeling that there was so much I learned in those stories he told, so I am eternally grateful he shared that with me. For me, it was absolutely priceless. My wife has told me multiple times how fortunate I am I took the time to go see him and those stories were not on the list of things I expected to happen.
I’m sure where that story came from, there will be many more.
I’d recommend recording the audio instead of doing live transcription. You can always transcribe it later. Any transcription you run five years from now is probably going to be way more accurate than anything you can run on your phone today. Plus, this way, you also preserve his voice and any nuances.
Again, thank you for this recommendation.
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, soon you may be
Prepare for death and follow me
>It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
The missing punchline turned out to be much harder to swallow than anything author could probably come up with. The whole thing turned out to be the typical in academic circles foreword to "selected works", where the author desperately tries to mention every even marginally useful person in a vain hope that by stroking their ego, they'd increase their "impact factor".
One of the points in that book that came out as bizarre was when the author sought love advice from his parents... at the young age of thirty-something years old. The reliance on the parents, while doesn't play the key role, is still prominently featured throughout this self-styled epitaph.
* * *
I've only ever gotten to know one of my grandparents. My grandmother passed away when I was twelve. I have zero photographs of her. Nothing's left in the family to remind me of her. I don't know if my mother is alive. The last time we spoke I was sixteen. I have no idea if she still lives where she used to live when I left. And I have no interest in discovering what if anything's left of her. My parents split up when I was seven. Despite being a spiteful and abusive evil piece of shit who couldn't hold a job and had no means to sustain herself, let alone two children, my mom got full custody by the time it came to the family court. So, I grew without a father. I got briefly to know him by the time I was in high-school, but then I left to a different country.
Today we don't speak the same language, live worlds apart, and there are front-lines of a very hot and bloody war between us. I don't come to visit, and don't expect to be able to come to my dad's funeral.
People waxing emotional over having living parents who took part in their lives, who had something to contribute... kind of turn my stomach upside-down. They have no idea how good they have it, and yet they present their quite happy and fulfilling life as some kind of world-ending tragedy.
Just because you have been damaged emotionally, does not invalidate other people's emotions. They are quite possibly feeling the lowest lows of their lives -- even if that low is a mountain pass versus your death valley. They still deserve respect in grief, even if overall they have had a wonderful life.
Someone with living and attentive parents, who lived in good health to their nineties, lived in their own home, in a well-to-do country, where their child came to visit them, in their own car, in good weather, etc... what more did they expect to happen? This is the best outcome by far they could expect from life. They've won the lottery, what more do they want?
No. You completely misunderstood my point. I'm not "emotionally damaged". Overwhelming majority of people on planet Earth don't have it anywhere near as good as the people in OP or a bunch of people commenting here about their quite alive and quite well-to-do families. With all that happened to me, I'm still among the few percents who has it relatively well. Vastly more people in this world will have it worse than I have.
The entitlement of people crying about how bad they have it, when they are among the fraction of a percent of those who have it the best it can possibly be is what's so disgusting.
What's wrong with that? Because these folks experienced the "best outcome" (presumably to see their parents live to old age) they shouldn't get emotional about it?
The top-level response in question is disgusting. It's like listening to someone who won a million dollars in a lottery complain that they didn't win ten millions. Should I really feel compassionate towards a "victim" of such a bad luck of only winning a single million? Even if the "victim" genuinely feels bad about themselves?
you're characterizing them as ungrateful, which isn't really coming across for me at all.
That's a straight-up lie. Read the comments here. People declaring themselves miserable are asking for compassion.
> People waxing emotional over having living parents who took part in their lives, who had something to contribute... kind of turn my stomach upside-down. They have no idea how good they have it, and yet they present their quite happy and fulfilling life as some kind of world-ending tragedy.
Good fortune can open oneself up to greater heartbreak, and misfortune can do the worse. Likewise, the opposite can happen: fortune can blind the fortunate, and enable happiness when the unfortunate overcome.
It goes all ways and directions. But for whatever hardship you have, you missed out on other sorts of hardship. And whatever hardships you dealt with, the author of any memoir may have missed those obstacles. Be at peace! And don't expect anyone to walk the same path as you.
I'm sorry you missed out on these experiences, but that doesn't mean that the normal experience of being a human - that is your parents living into your own adulthood - ought to be taboo.
Whatever your fortune or misfortune opens you to is only relevant if you are under... maybe twelve years old. As a grownup, you are expected to be able to put things into perspective and realize that complaining about a pea under twenty mattresses doesn't really make you into a princess.
> the normal experience of being a human - that is your parents living into your own adulthood
However common this is, it's not the point. The point is that people in this thread complain about the best outcome that is possible in this situation. These people complain about winning the lottery for crying out loud. How much more entitled can you get?
Yes, we recognize that having loving parents is an immeasurable blessing. While their passing is not a world-ending tragedy, it is precisely because we know how precious that interaction is, that we mourn their passing - and encourage others who have it to treasure it.
But there are other precious relationships and interactions that we can establish, build, and treasure.
I live in the world where about half the inhabitants don't eat meat out of "moral concerns" absolutely ignoring the grim reality of most of the world that will eat whatever food they have, and a lot of the time would have none.
People who protest about political causes in lands and cultures they don't understand because a propaganda ad featuring a bruised child in a pile of rubble made them feel sad.
People throwing themselves at the police at another pointless protest rally, only to be greeted at the police station by a mug of hot chocolate and be dispatched home to sleep in their soft and cozy beds.
There's nothing deep or special in this "loss". It make sense to mourn the loss of a life of a young man committing suicide because he was abandoned by the world around him. And I've seen that. It makes sense to mourn the loss of life of a young woman who got hooked up on heroin and died of overdose after an attempted recovery--and I've seen that too. It makes sense to regret the loss of young child's life, whose entire family was killed by poorly planned and poorly executed missile attack. Because such loss of life was avoidable, it took something that had a potential and squandered it. Old people dying of old age is nothing like any of the above. It's what's supposed to happen. It's how I want to go. It's how I want for everyone I care about to go.
I've spent enough time with ER to develop strong feeling of disgust for people who start crying "oh but my mom, she was only ninety-three!" and then latching onto the doctor's sleeves preventing them from tending to other patients. These also tend to show in large family groups and block the entire department for hours by driving attention to themselves with loud wining, arguing with the medical staff and other people in the ER. Demanding unlimited attention due to their "devastating loss". Demanding that the medical staff instantly produce all sorts of forms, perform all kinds of unnecessary procedures, basically, only to drive attention to themselves.
There’s no fairness to the audience you’ll have. Or they will have. Some people will experience a pebble in their shoe, tell the harrowing story, and people will hail them for the courage that they are showing. The openess. The hard-earned wisdom. And there’s nothing anything can do about that.
Sometimes the move goes the other way. I have friends and extended family whose parents moved to be closer to them.
[0] https://stoicismu.com/stoicism-negative-visualization/