Some terrible personal news(mattcutts.com) |
Some terrible personal news(mattcutts.com) |
I just learned my father who I was not close to for several decades has died - just yesterday. I have mixed emotions about someone who was very distant to me and can't even imagine losing my wife. The only thing I can think of that would keep me alive is my son. I don't know what I want to say but I guess maybe there is comfort in being around family in this very difficult time. I will think about you and your wife, please take care.
Words fail me this time. I can't imagine what it must feel like.
Damn. I don't know what I would do without my wife. She reminds me to change my clothes and shower when I have been coding for days and always makes sure I am warm enough while I sleep.
She married when I was 8, bought a home, had two kids and lived till I was 25.
Then, one day she slept on the couch and never woke up.
Some aneurism im the brain killed her without any warning.
Life is cruel :/
I'm blessed to have been married for 10 years, but if I'm honest, I know I have taken my wife for granted at times.
I'm so sorry for your loss, but this is an important reminder to live life to the fullest with no regrets, because you don't know how long you or your loved ones truly have.
This is the only fact that comforts me when confronted with the tragedy of our existence.
(It's a rose, in case that isn't obvious.)
But your work have inspired me on more than one occasion. I've always loved following your comments on HN.
I'm so sorry for your loss. I wish there were things that I can say to make you feel any better.
This is a wake up call for all of us. Thanks for your positive impact. That is the real value you get from the Internet people. All my thoughts and condolences for you and your family.
Now I think its going to be a sucky day.
I'm sure that rokhayakebe means well (and I'm sure you do). Different people and cultures have different ways of offering condolence. It's what's in the heart that matters and that can't easily be judged online.
Celebrating what you had, and the persons life with you, rather than dwelling on the loss is actually recommended as a healthy way to grieve (though we each grieve differently)
He's also been an active blogger, sharing his insights from all the work he's done at Google and beyond. These blogs have been discussed here on HN often.
I think people here feel like he's a part of our community and a positive part of the tech community at large.
If the man himself had died, I get why that might find its way here because then you could talk about his work etc.
Personal loss happens to every one of us, be it family or friends. It's part of life, it's heart breaking, it's horrible, it sucks, it's painful. Then, you draw strength from their memory and move on because there's no other choice.
PSA: please, please enroll in a CPR class. It's incredibly simple to learn and administer and you will learn so many things like the role of aspirin, AED usage and of course cpr.
Totally sad and didn't in anyway mean to diminish this news.
Losing your significant other is something that you never get over - you live with the emptiness and the hurt, and you learn to move on and hope that the "fog" eventually lifts. It's something that only someone else who has been through the same experience will understand. I was lucky to meet a friend who had lost her husband a couple years before, and she helped me through the hardest times.
Matt, if you ever read these comments, all my thoughts and condolences for you. I know "thoughts and prayers" does nothing, but a lot more people care than you realize.
Hang in there.
I found that quite cutting. I'm not sure I could go on if my wife died prematurely. My mind has turned to this on occassions when people close to me have suffered severe illness or died, and I just can't see in my minds eye how I could cope.
A close family friend took his own life shortly after his wife died of cancer. After over 25 years of living together, I guess it was just too much for him to continue without her.
I was too young at the time to understand and to be honest I'm still too young to understand.
But I have other people who rely on me, my children, my sister, the company I work for. So even though I am in tears as I write this, I know that I have to cope, I have to find a way to be.
It's going to take a while.
I often wonder if I would have been a better person if she was there.
I'm a father, and I used to worry about what might happen to my young kids if I died. It would be a great comfort to me to imagine them, after they got older, making an effort to interview people who knew me, asking about what I was interested in, what mattered to me, what I used to talk about, how I talked, how serious/happy/neurotic/patient/stingy/grouchy/etc. I was. With this model, they could imagine conversations with me, discuss things with me, try not to disappoint me, etc.
Fortunately--for me, anyway--my kids are old enough now that they will never get my voice out of their heads, even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow (and even if they are driving the bus!) It's too late for them.
How about you? If you seriously think she might have made you a better person, why not help her by giving her a second chance?
In general, your parents might be responsible for what you are when you turn 18, but every step you do afterwards is your responsibility. I know people who are over 50 and still make their parents responsible for the bad things in their life, ignoring the 30 years they had to fix the problems of their past.
So yes, it might be a bad start to loose your mother that early, but if you think you could do better (by your own standards): You are the only person who has the authority and power to change yourself.
Sorry, this might sound a little tough given the overall topic, but I think it is is very important to realize this early in life.
You're a strong person.
For what it's worth Matt, you have mine.
In this time, I've learned a few things about grief. That it affects everyone differently. That there's no right or wrong way to grieve. Some of us feel guilt, anger, sadness, depression, or numbness... or all of the above.
I also discovered that my wife's passing and my grief made other people feel uncomfortable. I sensed it was hard for folks to know what to say or do. And that's ok—there isn't much you can say or do that will change things for those closest to loss.
But, speaking for myself, it does mean a lot when someone reaches out and shares their thoughts. In my experience, the best things to say are to acknowledge the hurt and to share how you feel. Avoid trying to make sense of it (you can't) or that things will get better (you don't know). If you're able, say the person's name. If you knew the person, tell your grieving friend how much she meant to you.
Matt, I didn't know your wife, Cindy, but I met you once and recall being struck by how smart, genuine, and kind you were, aside from all the great work you've done to help me learn about SEO. From what you've shared about Cindy, I can tell she is an amazing person, that she is loved, and that she is missed dearly. My heart goes out to you and your family.
My heart aches for Matt. I don't know him or his wife, but I know the feeling of being unmoored. In fact I've used that same word to describe it.
I agree that people never know how to act about the situation. It's weird now to think of all of the people I have met who only know me as a widower, who never knew me when my wife was alive.
I appreciated the outpouring of support I received in the immediate aftermath. It was overwhelming, but not unwelcome.
I can't imagine how he must feel. I very much hope he is doing ok.
We've lost some coworkers, always seemingly too soon. I've been to a couple of wakes, one for a coworker's wife.
I don't want to say we're like family, but we look out for each other. The year before the company rolled out 2.5x salary life insurance, someone started a crowdfunding campaign after a coworker's sudden death that raised over $50K in one day.
I know I've been here too long, but I'll miss it. I grew up here.
I'm really sorry to hear this news.
If there's anything the community can do to help, please don't hesitate, you've helped us all in ways small and large.
Stay strong, she lives on in you and everyone else she touched - continue to treat her good by taking care of yourself and everyone else she is a part of.
I certainly hope this isn't perceived as being insensitive. I can't imagine the pain he's going through, and I truly do hope he finds some amount of comfort or normalcy in this unimaginably painful time.
So Matt, thanks for the influence you've had on my life, and I owe thanks to Cindy, too.
I feel for Matt and anyone else who has to endure a loss.
If it helps any, Matt, I found that writing down as much as I could somehow helped me get my head around it. It didn't help with the pain, but it was somehow reassuring to know that the feelings I had right after the loss had been captured somewhere forever.
I don't have any words of wisdom, and my sharing my own story probably won't help. Somehow we must carry on. There are many times that I forget why we must somehow carry on, but I find if I just cling to that phrase long enough, I eventually remember again. Our thoughts are with you.
What I can say is with time things get better. No, time doesn’t heal all wounds - the loss of a loved one will stay with you for the rest of your life, but you will go from thinking about it every minute to a couple times a day to a couple times a week, to a few times a year, etc. Sometimes the pain will still hit you like a fully loaded truck, other times you will instead recall the joy that was brought to your life and be thankful for the time you had however brief.
I have absolutely no idea how much pain Matt is having to endure right now, and I won’t pretend to imagine - so the best I can say is the above, it does get better, but that doesn’t ever make it “okay”. All we can ever hope is that as time passes those moments of happy remembrance outweigh the gut punches, and I hope that everyone who has suffered a loss reaches that point.
It really sucks that you had no warning, no time to spend in the last days. Knowing that it is coming sucks but being taken like that sucks (I've lost family to cancer, that is both better and more sucky).
It's clear that you loved her and that just makes it worse. Shit.
I keep thinking of stuff to say but it's all about me and my wife, don't want it to be about us. So I'm sorry for your loss, I hope you have family to support you, and I hope things get better for you.
I can say I am where I am because of all of my hard work. But I know that isn't entirely true. It would have been much harder for me to move out of the small town I grew up in and where I went to college, to the city where I live with much better opportunities making far too little to support myself in the beginning without their support. I can draw a pretty straight line from my first low paying job as a computer operator that didn't pay enough to make it to where I am today 20 years later.
If it weren't for them, I probably would have gotten a job that paid more then working on mainframes but without the growth opportunities in a small town.
And most people do boot have the skill to do a full character model at the age of 6. It takes special talent nature to do that even when old. That is even ignoring the fact that people change and adapt over time in hard to predict ways.
So this thought exercise is actually protecting your own wishes through the light of some imagined model of a person. Might as well use Tarot cards instead.
The poster said he was 6 in 2001. It's no longer 2001, and he's no longer 6. I told him he couldn't have done it back then but it might be worth trying now.
I think what GP is aiming at is this: If you think you are a worse person (whatever that means) than you could be, be it from your or any other persons' perspective, is it too late to change?
Or put differently: Years after someones death, the picture of what one could be, is a mind-game already. From here to picturing what you/your mind would like to change is not that much of a stretch.
If you suspect this is happening to you (all of the sudden you can't really breathe), is there anything you can even do? Or just hope it's not bad enough to be fatal?
Also an ounce of prevention: avoid extended sitting; exercise regularly.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/tc/pulmonary-embolism-treatment-o...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/deep-vein-thr...
Like xab9's comment, please do not take offence in my comment either.
I was working late to make up some time and had headphones on. Wife told me "I'm gonna go soak in the tub and go to bed, see you in a bit." A couple hours later I finished what I was doing and headed towards the bedroom. I noticed the bathroom light was still on, and found her. Apparent heart attack and she drowned in the bathtub, and she'd been gone a while by the time I found her. Sudden wrenching loss. No opportunity to make up for fights. No goodbye. Just.. gone.
Anyway. This isn't about me. This is about the community helping Matt, in whatever way we can.
Recommending some-one go and seek help or signs or warning signs of underlying dependency that isn't healthy for a strong mature relationship is not belittling someone. Instead its is concern and recommendation to seek help is caring about some-one I have no social relationship to. If I didn't care I wouldn't say anything.
To be a single-digit employee, you had to start in the 70s -- i.e., 40 years ago. My friend -- I don't think it'd be appropriate to name him -- has "only" been there 30, which means he joined a healthy-sized Apple already 10 years into its life.
In 1994. Apple was on top of the world. They were the number one or number two computer seller and the PPC Macs were introduce and then Windows 95 happened.
It happens.
I’m going to put down HN now and play Minecraft with my wife or something, because now I feel like I’m squandering my time with her.
When those are the causes of death that we start to track, perhaps the world will become a better place.
> he died because he was homeless and couldn't find his way to the help he needed.
taking your approach, you'd also have to allow at least some of those death certificates to list cause of death as: "he died because he was homeless, and he was homeless because he was a drunkard and an addict who was horrible to his family and most everyone he dealt with."
or is the intent to permit maudlin sentiments only?
When I called to have my late wife removed from my insurance at work, the lady who changed it messed up and removed her effective the day before she passed away - so all sorts of insurance claims started bouncing back "not covered". It took me a year and a half to get in touch with someone at the insurance company who said "oh my. you poor dear. let me fix this" and she had it corrected in less than five minutes.. but for that 18 months I had to deal with almost-monthly bills coming in with her name on them...
We never hear about the wife that lives 10 more years after their 85+ year old husband dies.
I had two cats, but they've since passed, and even before that it wasn't the same.
It's been almost ten years, and there's not a few days that go by without me thinking that nobody would miss me if I decided to join her.
It's a big old company though (one of the oldest in the field), and this is in broadcast engineering which is far more conservative. IME Peoppe in the Internet facing parts are far more flitty.
While some older engineers are happy to retreat into comfortably old technologies like cameras and microphones, there's plenty more who havve spent the time to learn about the trend towards IP. They are very valuable, in contrast to say a "generic" network engineer, because they understand the domain, they fundamentally know a 20ms outage on a network is catastrophic.
Technically, he's worked for several different companies. For a while he was working for a different company, but doing exactly the same work, with the same people, in the same building.
I don't think it will be easy to replace network engineers like him, who have been doing the job literally as long as the consumer internet has existed.
I think a lot of people leave as soon as their stock vests (3-4 years) and it’s obvious they are not on an upward track. And the few who got on to the upward tracks are set for life and have no incentive to leave ever. There’s no middle ground.
Either that, or find a company that does raises in line with what you’d get from moving. Netflix is famous for this (and has high retention), but there are other companies. The company I work for has a similar approach and I know I’m unlikely to make more at another company unless I move into finance, in which case see above.
Netflix has high turnover, about 15-20% depending on source.
I spent 9 years at one company - 7 years longer than I should have. After a 10K raise the first year and with 3% raises after that and bonuses slowly being cut, I only made $7K more in 2008 than I did in 2002. After that, I started aggressively job hopping - 4 jobs - and learning and over the next 10 years, I made over 60K more.
Now, I am looking to see what technology I should jump on and best case, I might be able to get $10K more over the next two years. I'm actually okay with that, I live a comfortable lifestyle.
I don't want to go into management and I want to stay hands on. My current position as a dev lead as about as high as I want to go and I would be fine being a strict individual contributor.
- If someone stays less than 2 years with a company something is wrong (the person, the company or the combination).
- If someone stays longer than 4 years with a company in the same job, without promotion, that person is probably not the 'manager' type.
Both situations just give you hints on whether someone matches the profile you are searching for, but switching companies after 3-4 years seems to be reasonable for people who want to get the most out of their salaries. Nevertheless, if someone got all his 'promotions' by switching jobs you should be wary of course.
On the other hand sometimes it may be good to have a pillow to soften a fall. If nothing happens, I spent that money on myself, no big deal, but if a tragedy happens out of the blue then it may save his life. It saved mine.
I'd be surprised if this hasn't been tested.
Maybe you don't hear. My grandparents were together since about 16 and my grandmother passed away 12 years ago. And I never seen couple more in love, including my grandma having tatoo of his name on her chest, something unheard of and frown upon back in the days. And my grandfather is turning 94 this summer.
If a millions people have marathon gaming sessions day in and day out, doesn’t it only make sense that one of them will die in their chair once in awhile? Was gaming really the cause?
and "he died of being homeless"? why was he homeless? because society was so cruel and uncaring? sure, he had nothing to do with it himself.
the other comment is right, this path inevitably leads to judgment and speculation.
Or, from a different epistemological viewpoint, the root cause of everything is God’s will.
Ascribing importance to intermediate causes is highly subjective, even assuming they can be reliably determined.
Contributing my own anecdata here: I am familiar with current and past employees at Netflix who have told me personally that plenty of people are fired from Netflix because they don't jive with the culture, not necessarily because they are incompetent. That's not intended to be a remark about Netflix being a toxic company; on the contrary, I think Netflix is pretty self-aware about its "corporate values." But that means that engineers who could succeed at Google, Facebook, etc might not succeed at Netflix because the latter looks for a lot of self-direction and career ambition, not just competence.
Circling back to the point: I've seen some people slice off involuntary termination numbers when discussing attrition at tech companies, but I don't think that's appropriate. Sometimes people leave because they're intellectually or financially unsatisfied, and that would mostly comprise the ~7.5-10% that leave voluntarily. But if the bar for being fired is lower, it's probably useful to incorporate the involuntary departures, because there's an argument many of them would leave voluntarily even if not fired due to a culture mismatch.
Only if you think that the laws of physics are deterministic, I guess.
If we actually understood that people literally died of not having enough money, or of lack of willpower to deal with a bureaucracy, or of homelessness, or of their mental state, there’s every chance that something might change.
if you actually understood the implications of following your logic, please take a moment to explain:
why do people not have enough money?
do some people waste away whatever time and money they have?
do some people fail to develop any marketable skills?
are some people just incapable of rendering valuable labor or service to anyone?
what percentage of those without money fit into that hopeless category?
what should be done about those people?
why does money exist in the first place?
how do we ensure that everybody will "have enough money"?
why do people lack willpower?
why do bureaucracies exist and what is the alternative?
why does homelessness exist?
do people in dire straits often reject help?
do people in dire straits often make things worse for themselves?
how do we force people to stop doing that?
why do people have differing mental states?
that's just for a start. then answer those questions in context of each individual life and death. but that won't be necessary if one thinks that all homeless are just "the homeless", or that all poor people are just "the poor".
but that would be oversimplification and "heavily missing information" in many cases, don't you think?
I understand the spirit of this, but it's entirely subjective and way too open for interpretation.
I think by and large people do understand these things contribute to illness & death, they are just able to separate themselves from that reality on a day-to-day basis.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bad-medicine-part-3-death-di...
Don't be afraid to let a little poetry into your life.
I'm in a conundrum whether to leave or not because the project hasn't shipped.
What do you put down for a drug overdose? Was he chasing the next good time or escaping the pain of being molested as a child?
Doctors would also be responsible for performing inquests into non-medical circumstances of a death, for which they are not trained and don't have any powers to gather evidence or take statements. I can't see that being popular with doctors.
Doctor would not be able to sign a death certificate until a Judge had completed an inquest into the non-medical circumstances. In which case the Judge would have to do so without the benefit of a medical certification as to the medical cause of death, which would have to remain open until the end of the inquest. In which case, I don't see how the inquest can reasonable be completed without a certification as to the medical facts, which is all a death certificate is.
Neither of those make any sense, so I'm sure those aren't what you are suggesting. How do you see this working?