
The Strangeness of Grief - Thevet
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/the-strangeness-of-grief
======
yarg
Grief really is weird - and perhaps even weirder for humans than for other
species.

Human tool use has primes us to see things that we can control not simply as
things we control, but as extensions of ourselves.

Human co and counter operative behaviour has forced us to adapt reflective
cognitive structures in which our minds attempt to simulate the minds of
others - most accurately for those we best understand, which includes the
people that we are closest to.

We use this simulation as an interface by which we can generate expectations
for how people we understand will respond to different situations - and we can
treat those that we trust as complex extensions of ourselves (unexpected
behaviour and especially betrayal in this context invalidates our internal
simulation not only of the world, but of ourselves).

And the death of a person known and trusted leaves us still with the cognitive
structures forged to deal with them, an orphaned piece of the mind which can
never again serve its prime function.

Ironically our inability to cope with the loss leads us to neglect the final
cognizant vestiges of the dead.

~~~
yarg
Sorry about the wall of text - I haven't been sleeping, and my mind's going
weird places.

~~~
bane
Actually, it was kind of beautiful.

~~~
yarg
Thanks man.

------
idclip
grief is a sonnet.

it's beauty, it's a lukewarm waterfall.

it's a warmth that washes

over us, intense.

consuming, penetrating

until we yield.

and in that silence, we let go.

grief is beautiful because it's a gentle descent, where in that abyss is a
hand that lifts us; like a infant just now born, being wrapped in warm cloth,
and given to its mother.

i have an intimate relationship with grief.

i see it coming again to visit, and i know it will be one of the last feelings
i will experience as i arrive.

it's only "strange" because we are not as familiar with non duality as we are
with duality.

grief is a chain that unbinds. it's a 10-Ton weight that makes you lighter.

i guess it's time for bed.

------
gerbilly
Having read a lot about VS Naipaul, and about his sometimes cantankerous
nature, I am touched to see how attached he became to his cat.

It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised by someone.

I've noticed from personal experience that it's often easier to grieve for
animals than for our own relatives.

The loss of my grandmother overwhelmed me so much that it could have passed
for indifference.

The organs of grief seemed to have been seared away, like I had stared at the
sun.

On the other hand I've wept over the loss of some of my pets.

Coincidentally, shortly after the loss of my grandmother, I was sick for three
years with all sorts of undiagnosable problems.

It was only after I started feeling physically better that I recognized the
depth of my grief. It felt like I might have followed her into the grave if I
hadn't pulled out of it in time.

~~~
nsomaru
It seems that as emotions become more subtle and deep, is is harder to express
them.

Think of the love between an old couple and a bunch of newly weds who can’t
stop repeating “I love you” to each other...eventually there seems to be a
point where you don’t need to say it anymore.

I’ve had a similar experience to you with the death of a loved one. The grief
was so deep and overwhelming that no action (not even crying) could express it
properly.

So I’ve concluded that surface emotions are easily expressed and you need a
master to really express the depths (in the form of art, poetry etc.)

------
celticmusic
A few years ago I was forced to put my cat down due to a neighbors dog
attacking her.

I took her to an emergency vet and spent over $3k trying to save her, but at
some point it became obvious that we couldn't and so the decision was made to
put her to sleep.

Throughout all of this I was upset and worried, but not overly so. In my mind,
I cared about her, but it was still just a cat.

Until they put her in my arms. I remember she looked up at me and started
purring and I just completely lost it. I'm not one who can cry in front of
other people, but at that moment I couldn't help it.

It took months before I stopped turning around expecting her to be there. When
it first happened my girlfriend made a comment about killing the dog. I know
she didn't mean it, she was just angry and lashing out. She still can't look
at a picture of her without crying.

Reading the description of Augustus brought it all back.

I basically don't have a relationship with that neighbor. I haven't gone into
detail, but that neighbor was either malicious or dumb. I chose to believe
dumb because that sort of anger does no one any good but I can't bring myself
to build any sort of relationship with the man.

I miss my programming buddy.

~~~
dingo454
I lost my cat in my 20ies, which died of old age. I wasn't living with my
parents anymore for years when this happened. I still sometimes weep when I
think about it, decades later.

My father got cancer and lived with it for about 7 years before dying. Our
relationship wasn't exactly close. When he was in the last weeks, I got so
used to the hospitals and health issues that everything seemed so normal to
me. I knew exactly what was eventually going to happen though. It only hit me
two days before he died, and it was with the brutality of an instantaneous
train-wreck.

You could have told me everything, exactly as I wrote it down now, I'm pretty
sure it wouldn't have made a difference.

------
choeger
Grief is the point of living. Only when losing something or someone hurts you,
you know their true value to yourself.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> Only when losing something or someone hurts you, you know their true value
to yourself._

I strongly disagree. Self-aware, introspective people who deliberately examine
what's important to themselves in a conscious effort to not take it for
granted, do not need to lose it to only then know the true value of it.

~~~
ianai
I don’t know, I freak out just thinking at the depths of loss I’ll experience
when my parents die. I’m aware enough by partially inspecting what they mean
and do for me to have a hard time fathoming the total of that “calculation.”

~~~
bitexploder
Read about stoics and negative visualization then give it a shot. Live in that
uncomfortable mental space of life without your parents. Not to dull their
life and your time left with them, but the opposite! The stoics used negative
visualization to appreciate what they had. Many people mistake the stoics for
being morbid, but it should work for most people to enhance their time and
ability to stay present with people they love. It is a profound and different
way to live compared to how most people seem to approach mortality, but it
works well for me. When they pass, there will still be grief, but you will
take their passing with the sure knowledge you optimized your time with them.

------
thulecitizen
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship
reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that
is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” \-
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

------
dundercoder
It has taken me a long time to internalize that grief is not a “bad” feeling,
but rather just an uncomfortable one. Until I was fully willing to experience
it, instead of avoid or ignore it, I was completely unable to move on. Grief
is indeed strange.

~~~
Fnoord
Can't we argue this is true for all "bad" feelings? If they were utterly
useless, why would they still exist? They have a function.

Love and grief is basically akin to "what goes up must go down". No high
without the low, like the rollercoaster life is.

------
cryptica
>> There are a number of high quality teams working on next generation
protocols today (Dfinity, Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum 2, Algorand

If any of these projects take over and crush all the other projects, I'm going
to have to seriously consider quitting software development and work in
marketing instead. The best thing about these projects is their marketing IMO.

