Growing up I didn't really know my father. He was an alcoholic and spent his time with his friends drinking when I was young. My parents separated when I was around 8 years old and I haven't seen my father since, even till this day (I am around 30).
I was never really close with my mother. We would eat dinner in separate rooms. We grew more and more distant throughout my teen years and when I was 20 I decided to disown her and we're now estranged.
There were multiple attempts to "get back" but none were successful. I think what I realised in the end was that she was too much of a free spirit. She wanted to have her separate life and have me co-exist in it, without dedicating herself to me like a parent normally would.
I don't think I'll miss them or feeling anything for them when they pass. My mother, maybe a little. My father, not at all. But I don't forsee being at her death bed, even if she told me she was dying. Maybe I'm just stubborn or am held captive by a matter of "principle and integrity". If a relationship is cut off, then it's cut off. Meaning you both have to deal with the good and the bad. I've decided there's more good than bad.
In some senses it feels like I never had parents at all. Like there's nothing to miss, because how can one miss an absence?
I hope though to be the parent I never had to my daughter. Unfortunately my partner has stage 4 cancer so won't be around for most of my daughter's life at a very young age, but that's okay. This is life and life is me.
Brother, you seem to be one strong man and I hope you will never run out of that strength. Sending you a big hug. All the best to your wife, daughter and you. I know it might sound trivial, but your purpose in life is so clear. All you have to do is be there for your girls. Stay strong!
Your dad is surely still suffering from this loss and if I had to guess, is probably awfully lonely and misses you. Life is too short to estrange family members over their political beliefs. Have you tried finding common ground in other areas, or asking your dad not to talk about politics? Along the lines of, “I miss you but your politics drive me crazy, can we hang out and not talk about anything political”?
If your dad can’t agree to be apolitical when you spend time together then it’s his choice to be estranged from you. But maybe he can, and maybe you guys can find a connection again.
I speak from personal experience here. I hope you’re able to find some reconciliation.
> Your dad is surely still suffering from this loss and if I had to guess, is probably awfully lonely and misses you.
Projecting emotions onto others' family members is presumptuous and unhelpful.
> I speak from personal experience here.
As an implicit baseline, this does nothing to strengthen your position. Highlighting personal experience only underscores how subjective and situation-dependent this advice is.
I can tell you from experience that this isn’t (solely) about politics.
Some, but not all, people sucked into the Fox News vortex literally have nothing else to talk about. Their entire life is Fox News, they will only talk about the topic du jour they saw on the screen that day.
It becomes tiring to try to connect with someone who only wants to connect with you about hating the imagined scapegoat of the day.
It’s definitely not solely a Fox News thing, I’ve experienced people who will only think about the daily discourse on Twitter or are only interested in whatever twitch streamer got “owned” by whichever other streamer. It is draining dealing with people like this, especially when their entire world view is fed by misinformation.
A lot of dads turn into Fox news dads. Comedian Shane Gillis has some funny routines about it. Maybe think of it as a kind of dementia and try to overlook it? Sorry if this sounds trite. Just seems like a shame to lose a relationship over politics.
Equally if we didn't distance ourselves from people who make harmful mistakes and those who believe dangerous, bigoted things we would all live miserably.
I'm in a custody battle to allow shared custody of my daughter. I don't really have anybody else that's important to me here. I understand your message is about positivity and resilience, but I can't help to feel sad for not having had parents, and the lemons life is throwing you. I admire your attitude, and can't but hope you will find the love and connection from others to make the bitter sweeter.
i tend to follow paths laid out by wishful thinking —knowingly, yet is there no intention.
and is it tough, i like to wander just as slow into the lostness.
if i was you, i‘d see the hope, that life, or god, the universe… whatever i might call it, has forced this life upon me while whispering to me, that just through pain, it will be honest,
and that i (specifically)— would not have grasped, in time, the misery, of what it— takes, not what i‘ve lost— for, and not from, me, to be the loving, present parent for my daughter, that i will— now for certain— be.
through the darkness, every cry through every scream,
for all the pain you‘ve taken— and not given me.
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.
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 :(
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 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 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 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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).
I'm 43 and my parents still wave to me just like this when I leave from a visit with them. It makes me incredibly sad to know the inevitable end to this. Barring something drastic happening, my dad will likely go first. I don't know how my mom will ever handle it. They've been married since she was 19 and he was 21. I don't know how any of us will handle it.
Don't hesitate to do the things today which will otherwise become regrets tomorrow.
Wonderful! Watching one's closest people age is so cool! I love looking at my wife (we've been married for 20 years) and seeing how she's changing through the years, her eyes, her skin, her figure, it's fascinating. Same for the wrinkles on my mother's hands, or even my own.
For me, there's nothing scary or sad about growing old and then dying. It's natural, it's beautiful, it's just great the way it is.
I agree, but that doesn't stop us from missing someone when they're gone, like a friend who's moved far away. The difference is that death is so final. There's absolutely no chance to call them or visit them. They're just gone.
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!
It's crazy how our purpose in life really is just to train another human or two to predict like we do, once per lifetime. Then we die and the new human has to do the same, all over again, a little bit better this time - maybe.
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.
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.
‘…little boy blue and the man in the moon. When ya coming’ home son? I don’t know when. We’ll get together then. You know we’ll have a good time then.’
All we have are snatches, glimpses, a rotoscope of moments. Then it’s gone. All of it.
Capture those waves, smiles and frowns. Cherish the light and the shadow while it’s possible because all that remains after is the long dark.
That website really talks to me.
Some people might click and click away.
Others, like me, will feel like being in your shoes.
Because they are.
Every 3/4 months I go and say hello to my mother and i see how she changes with age. No photos, but the same sense of ineluctability
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.
I lost both of my parents due to Covid in late January (my Mom) and early February (my Dad) in 2021. I was 38 years old at that time and my parents were in their late 60s. They were very healthy for their age, but it didn't matter. They were gone within a month since their first Covid symptoms. I was on a different continent, international travel was hard during that time (it was still pre vaccines), I had to leave my wife with 2 young kids (6 month old and 4 year old) behind and fly back home alone in order to bury my parents. The OP talks about leaving and waving, and it's very touching. In my case, what almost broke me was the arrival at the airport (after a long 24 hour journey) and for the first time in my life there was nobody waiting and waving (I don't have any siblings). I'm still getting used to the fact that there won't be anyone waiting for me there. Fortunately, I have my own family and I'm greeted with lots of love anytime I come back to them.
27 years. And yet, these aren’t that many photos. It’s not grains of sand running through an hourglass. It’s forks of a single meal. No seconds. And with the difference that the plate may be snatched from you at any moment, even though you thought you’d still have plenty left.
I can’t imagine sticking a frail but mobile and healthy parent in assisted living. I would give them a room to spend their last days or I would forever regret it. Anyone else?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Growing up I didn't really know my father. He was an alcoholic and spent his time with his friends drinking when I was young. My parents separated when I was around 8 years old and I haven't seen my father since, even till this day (I am around 30).
I was never really close with my mother. We would eat dinner in separate rooms. We grew more and more distant throughout my teen years and when I was 20 I decided to disown her and we're now estranged.
There were multiple attempts to "get back" but none were successful. I think what I realised in the end was that she was too much of a free spirit. She wanted to have her separate life and have me co-exist in it, without dedicating herself to me like a parent normally would.
I don't think I'll miss them or feeling anything for them when they pass. My mother, maybe a little. My father, not at all. But I don't forsee being at her death bed, even if she told me she was dying. Maybe I'm just stubborn or am held captive by a matter of "principle and integrity". If a relationship is cut off, then it's cut off. Meaning you both have to deal with the good and the bad. I've decided there's more good than bad.
In some senses it feels like I never had parents at all. Like there's nothing to miss, because how can one miss an absence?
I hope though to be the parent I never had to my daughter. Unfortunately my partner has stage 4 cancer so won't be around for most of my daughter's life at a very young age, but that's okay. This is life and life is me.
That's... rough, man. Take care. I hope that on the whole, the light manages to balance the darkness somewhat.
Brother, you seem to be one strong man and I hope you will never run out of that strength. Sending you a big hug. All the best to your wife, daughter and you. I know it might sound trivial, but your purpose in life is so clear. All you have to do is be there for your girls. Stay strong!
My mom died a few years ago and I stopped talking to my dad over his Fox News brainworms.
I feel like an orphan now. I have a couple siblings but we're distant.
Your dad is surely still suffering from this loss and if I had to guess, is probably awfully lonely and misses you. Life is too short to estrange family members over their political beliefs. Have you tried finding common ground in other areas, or asking your dad not to talk about politics? Along the lines of, “I miss you but your politics drive me crazy, can we hang out and not talk about anything political”?
If your dad can’t agree to be apolitical when you spend time together then it’s his choice to be estranged from you. But maybe he can, and maybe you guys can find a connection again.
I speak from personal experience here. I hope you’re able to find some reconciliation.
> Your dad is surely still suffering from this loss and if I had to guess, is probably awfully lonely and misses you.
Projecting emotions onto others' family members is presumptuous and unhelpful.
> I speak from personal experience here.
As an implicit baseline, this does nothing to strengthen your position. Highlighting personal experience only underscores how subjective and situation-dependent this advice is.
I can tell you from experience that this isn’t (solely) about politics.
Some, but not all, people sucked into the Fox News vortex literally have nothing else to talk about. Their entire life is Fox News, they will only talk about the topic du jour they saw on the screen that day. It becomes tiring to try to connect with someone who only wants to connect with you about hating the imagined scapegoat of the day.
It’s definitely not solely a Fox News thing, I’ve experienced people who will only think about the daily discourse on Twitter or are only interested in whatever twitch streamer got “owned” by whichever other streamer. It is draining dealing with people like this, especially when their entire world view is fed by misinformation.
A lot of dads turn into Fox news dads. Comedian Shane Gillis has some funny routines about it. Maybe think of it as a kind of dementia and try to overlook it? Sorry if this sounds trite. Just seems like a shame to lose a relationship over politics.
> Just seems like a shame to lose a relationship over...
This statement has the same tone when you replace "politics" with adultery or racism.
Political beliefs represent the person and what they value. Some beliefs can't be overlooked and are not compatible with the relationship.
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.
If we distanced ourselves from everyone who made a mistake or who believed something different than we believe, we would have no relationships at all.
Equally if we didn't distance ourselves from people who make harmful mistakes and those who believe dangerous, bigoted things we would all live miserably.
I'm in a custody battle to allow shared custody of my daughter. I don't really have anybody else that's important to me here. I understand your message is about positivity and resilience, but I can't help to feel sad for not having had parents, and the lemons life is throwing you. I admire your attitude, and can't but hope you will find the love and connection from others to make the bitter sweeter.
i tend to follow paths laid out by wishful thinking —knowingly, yet is there no intention. and is it tough, i like to wander just as slow into the lostness. if i was you, i‘d see the hope, that life, or god, the universe… whatever i might call it, has forced this life upon me while whispering to me, that just through pain, it will be honest, and that i (specifically)— would not have grasped, in time, the misery, of what it— takes, not what i‘ve lost— for, and not from, me, to be the loving, present parent for my daughter, that i will— now for certain— be.
through the darkness, every cry through every scream, for all the pain you‘ve taken— and not given me.
My situation isn't nearly as extreme as yours, but this book helped me a lot: https://books.google.com/books/about/Jonice_Webb_Running_on_...
Sending you a huge hug
Two wrongs make a right? I'm guessing "around 30" means late 20s.
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.
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.
Amazing!
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.
Again, thank you for this recommendation.
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 :(
We reach!
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!
It is a daunting task. I've been at it for years.
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 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.
Highly recommend this or another method.
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.
> 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.
> how do you say goodbye when you’re the one leaving?
promise to bring back something nice
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.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
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.
Yeah, it was also sad to see his mom's smile fade after that.
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...
Only if you have a good relationship with parents. Many people don't want to spend any time with family, moving to the other city as soon as possible.
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).
All the best.
Remember friend, as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, soon you may be
Prepare for death and follow me
Yep, got a relative with that exact phrase on their headstone.
I'm 43 and my parents still wave to me just like this when I leave from a visit with them. It makes me incredibly sad to know the inevitable end to this. Barring something drastic happening, my dad will likely go first. I don't know how my mom will ever handle it. They've been married since she was 19 and he was 21. I don't know how any of us will handle it.
Don't hesitate to do the things today which will otherwise become regrets tomorrow.
Be there for her after and don’t live with any regrets
Wonderful! Watching one's closest people age is so cool! I love looking at my wife (we've been married for 20 years) and seeing how she's changing through the years, her eyes, her skin, her figure, it's fascinating. Same for the wrinkles on my mother's hands, or even my own.
For me, there's nothing scary or sad about growing old and then dying. It's natural, it's beautiful, it's just great the way it is.
I agree, but that doesn't stop us from missing someone when they're gone, like a friend who's moved far away. The difference is that death is so final. There's absolutely no chance to call them or visit them. They're just gone.
That's sad, and being sad is natural too.
Am I the only one who had tears after seeing the last picture where none of his parents were there to say goodbye?
Me too fellow hacker!
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!
Have a beautiful day!
Love from India!
It's crazy how our purpose in life really is just to train another human or two to predict like we do, once per lifetime. Then we die and the new human has to do the same, all over again, a little bit better this time - maybe.
I'd argue that's ONE of the many purposes that people can choose in life :)
Well, someone's chopping onions. In a Datacenter. Go figure.
Dear fellow hacker,
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!
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.
Impressive work.
I don't appreciate this stuff, I'm not the target audience for it, but I'll be darned if this didn't kick me hard in the feels.
Very touching and beautiful. Just now, this year, I started taking pictures of my parents waving me away on the platform.
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.
[0] https://stoicismu.com/stoicism-negative-visualization/
Hits hard for me as a Gen X - my parents are still here but it's a reminder of how time is passing on us. They live in Africa so visits are few.
‘…little boy blue and the man in the moon. When ya coming’ home son? I don’t know when. We’ll get together then. You know we’ll have a good time then.’
All we have are snatches, glimpses, a rotoscope of moments. Then it’s gone. All of it.
Capture those waves, smiles and frowns. Cherish the light and the shadow while it’s possible because all that remains after is the long dark.
That website really talks to me. Some people might click and click away. Others, like me, will feel like being in your shoes. Because they are. Every 3/4 months I go and say hello to my mother and i see how she changes with age. No photos, but the same sense of ineluctability
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.
I lost both of my parents due to Covid in late January (my Mom) and early February (my Dad) in 2021. I was 38 years old at that time and my parents were in their late 60s. They were very healthy for their age, but it didn't matter. They were gone within a month since their first Covid symptoms. I was on a different continent, international travel was hard during that time (it was still pre vaccines), I had to leave my wife with 2 young kids (6 month old and 4 year old) behind and fly back home alone in order to bury my parents. The OP talks about leaving and waving, and it's very touching. In my case, what almost broke me was the arrival at the airport (after a long 24 hour journey) and for the first time in my life there was nobody waiting and waving (I don't have any siblings). I'm still getting used to the fact that there won't be anyone waiting for me there. Fortunately, I have my own family and I'm greeted with lots of love anytime I come back to them.
This might be the first Hacker News Thread that left me sobbing.
Oh boy. Right in the feels. My dad is starting to decline.
Reminds me of the finale of Six Feet Under.
"You can't take a picture of this. It's already gone"
This is beautiful, and heartbreaking.
Thanks for sharing.
As a hobbyist photographer, I am deeply touched by this. Thank you for sharing this.
Man the last one where the mother is at the house (3/2017) is just tough.
Beautiful fragility captured.
Beautiful and so very sad.
I cried.
27 years. And yet, these aren’t that many photos. It’s not grains of sand running through an hourglass. It’s forks of a single meal. No seconds. And with the difference that the plate may be snatched from you at any moment, even though you thought you’d still have plenty left.
wow, right in the feels
Beautiful. Sad. Life.
I can’t imagine sticking a frail but mobile and healthy parent in assisted living. I would give them a room to spend their last days or I would forever regret it. Anyone else?
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.
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.
As I said, I'm sorry.
It is very weird to write all this about a nice series of photographs
This is less about the series of photograph and more of a response to a bunch of other disjoint top-level responses in this thread.
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?
Silly comparison, but you should feel compassion when someone is hurting, yes. It doesn't matter if you think it's justified pain. It's still pain.
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.
> No one is asking for your compassion or complaining,
That's a straight-up lie. Read the comments here. People declaring themselves miserable are asking for compassion.
Sour grapes.
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.
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?
It seems to me you aren't going to relate much as you haven't experienced losing parents who you have strong bonds with.