I've thought about this just so someone can let my cat out of my apt

well, your blog kind of died, i guess.

that reminds me, i still need to revive mine...

I think this is true when someone dies young or unexpectedly. After a long illness though, the family has likely already done a lot of grieving, and may even be feeling something more like relief than grief.

I know my dad felt that when his father passed. I did too, but not as much as he did, because my dad was taking his dad to doctor's appointments and caring for him after surgery and generally seeing him in very vulnerable circumstances.

I just don't at all think that this is equivalent to not acknowledging that someone is dying.

You can grieve before someone finally passes. My grandma lived well into her eighties. Her final two years were not great but we did what we could to make it better for her. When she passed it felt like a good part of feeling for her hardship has already passed, together with the relief of knowing that she is no longer suffering.

Grieving is important. To do it properly be close to those who need it. Dying is a process and not a moment. Be there for those that need it and give yourself room to do it properly as well.

I dunno. I guess if I ever die I would love to have people party / celebrate / etc rather than all be sad, but it all depends on the person.

Last year I was invited to a "living wake". The person was still alive and looked better than some of his friends. It was basically a party. But he had advanced brain cancer and did pass a few months later. The idea of such an event was and still is highly strange to me.

Yep, this isn't great. Grieving people aren't in a "let's party" mood. It comes off as tone-deaf.

This just stinks of "don't ever show real emotion" US 'tough guy-ism' as it sometimes translates via women. I remember being pressured to be either fun/funny or kind/nurturing. Actual real expression, expression of sadness, depression, etc was always something I was discouraged to do or even punished for. I remember feeling weird when I went to therapy. Like "Oh wait, I can just...talk about my real emotions?"

I had a "jokey gal" persona for a long time, so maybe this hits closer to home for me, and it was a reflection of my social anxiety and unwillingness and lack of support in life to ever be vulnerable. So when I see the "jokester" persona, I always pause because it often comes from a bad place. I could even see myself doing this when I was younger. Today, I would never because the younger woman I was no longer exists and she would have done this out of fear and suffering and denial of self, not "fun."

There's a certain immature, 'won't touch one's emotions' 'Michael Scott-ism' here that's off-putting. A sort of "Fun gal in the office" energy that betrays immaturity and even insecurity. The desire to be popular and have high-social capital extends even to death it seems.

I lost a parent a while ago. I would not have appreciated a "jokey" display at all. It was the saddest day of my life and even today I still mourn. I'll never get over it.

And a sort of productivity culture-esque, "haha we had our fun, now go back to work/school," or whatever. In reality, a lot of people need time to grieve. I wish I took off more work than the 1 day bereavement I got from work and the 1 pto day I had. I was a high-key mess for at least a couple weeks, and a low-key mess for months. I would find myself crying randomly. I would have these sudden intrusive thoughts like "What does it matter, we just die in the end." It took a while to get where I am today where I have optimism about life and where I see my parent as gone forever, and without feeling pain about it.

As for cultures that have celebratory funerals, well, this isn't one of those cultures, so its not normal to expect people to conform to that. And even in those cultures there's a different more somber ceremony attached to the celebration.

That being said, maybe this was her coping mechanism, and it got her this far. Great. That worked for her. But for the grieving people, maybe "jokey gal" persona isn't the best. shrug, its not a big deal, but this being posted here as some kind of amazing and exceptional thing isn't great either. This has problems worth mentioning. I think we all think we can just 'fix things' or 'cheat the suffering of death' by being creative or different, but the human brain remains as-is. It wants to grieve and often there's no getting out of that. Loss is painful and can't just be turned into fun by will alone. I think in most cultures this would be off-putting if not offensive. On the other hand, we have to respect how people wanted to be remembered.

That being said, the stages of grief book helped me. It validated my pain and showed me a path. I hope her friends and family find what works for them. Maybe "Michael Scott-isms" worked for her, that's fine, but it definitely is not going to work for everyone. So just a reminder, there are many ways to grief, and some will do it via comedy, but its also okay to go down a traditional route or even get into therapy over it. Its also okay to cry today and laugh tomorrow and vice-versa. Sometimes I think of my parent and just chuckle at a memory. Life can be complex this way.

She seemed fun and nice. I hope the above isn't too critical, but its more for us still living. I hope she is now resting in peace. Or, as I am a Buddhist, that her karma was found a fortunate rebirth.

With multiple references to Dunkin' and scratch tickets in lieu of flowers, I feel like I was reading this in her accent.

[flagged]

Indeed. Similarly, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, written by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, who had suffered a stroke with locked-in syndrome, by blinking his left eyelid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butter...

Murphy seems like a neat person. I'll check out her book.

I sense a bit of AI in this obit. Most tellingly, a suspicious emdash after Chipotle is a definite flag.

The way the author describes post-death events in the past tense, non-hypothetically, indicates that someone other than Murphy had a hand in its authorship.

(Would an author really write "Check it out, it’s called “F Off Cancer” by Linda Brossi Murphy"? That's not even the title of the book!)

As someone with ALS and won't see next year, please do not post my memoriam page to HN.

A perfectly fair question, and predictably but unfortunately down voted.

I think it's of interest because (1) it implicitly presents a question of how to go about a premeditated end-of-life message to be shared in an online space.

And (2) relative to typical prose in this context, it's a bit cheeky, more like an "aw, shucks" than a grand tragedy. Something about it reached across the veil of impersonality, again in a digital space. And to me at least it's raising a question of how you choose to express yourself and how that choice gives you life in the ability to be regarded and known by others, and perhaps an even more general question of how we're all already doing something like that on a day to day basis. I don't think anyone who voted on it said any of that stuff out loud but you could feel those themes as implicitly present even if it's hard to put your finger on exactly what they are.

To your point I don't think it's the only message that has questions like those behind it, but I don't think it's ever been teed up for community discussion quite like this.

I don't understand what it is doing here either.

I know it feels like everyone is in tech, but, in fact, there's no evidence for that here:

After I graduated, I had a brief stint as a Nursing Home Administrator until David Jr. was born, then stayed home and hatched a couple more pups over the next few years. In 2000, I formally joined the family real estate business and worked there until I was diagnosed… with ALS (I kept working through my long battle with cancer 12 years ago) … Yikes!! Cancer…THEN ALS. Ugh, Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up! I am very proud of the book I wrote about my journey through cancer. Check it out, it’s called “F Off Cancer” by Linda Brossi Murphy.

I think this was a planned post she wrote while dealing with her disease, and likely a family member added in some relevant details and posted it. I've had a few terminally ill family friends that want to reclaim some control in death what life had taken from them, so they plan their funeral and some post death things out ahead of time.

Am I wrong or does it just look like a funeral home posted this for her? Likely filled in a few data points as requested?

Presumably she wrote it as "when I died on <insert day of death>"

edit: the funeral home published this

previous comment: could have been programmed as `Time.now - 1.day` to be published if no action was taken on the day of