45 karma · joined May 11, 2016
This is also the most alone I have ever felt. Even surrounded by my huge family I felt alone in my pain. I consider myself extremely lucky, I have an incredible wife and loving families from both of us, and yet the grief has left me feeling isolated.
One thing I have thought about a lot is an analogy someone shared with me. They said that when we lose a loved one, we are given a box. In that box, is a ball and a button. Every time that ball touches the button, we feel pain. When the loss happens, the ball fills the box and is constantly pressing the button. The pain seems inescapable. Over time, the ball gets slightly smaller. It still will press on the button, but maybe not as often. The pain doesn’t change and it is always there waiting to be triggered, but as time goes on it may happen less.
We carry that box for the rest of our lives I guess. I still don’t know if there will ever be a day I don’t miss my amazing brother so much it hurts.
I guess I don’t really have much advice for how to deal with the pain. But it has been helpful for me to read your and other's posts on here. Thank you.
Working in a Fortune 500 company it is amazing the kind of information we have available for "Powerful People". I also feel like more and more of that information is available to everyone, the difference is that "Powerful People" have the money and resources to pay teams to sift through, organize, and present the information in an actionable way. Companies, Powerful People, and Governments spend tons of resources on trying to understand the information. Data is cheap, understanding the data is extremely expensive.
Information is out there for the taking, but it is useless in the raw state it starts in.
I read an interesting story a few weeks ago about how the CIA has entire teams of cartographers whose job is to show data on information on maps in a way that tells a story. That is their full time job to work with researchers and analysts to create "pretty" representations of data that are informative and easy to digest.
I think data is only interesting because of the stories it tells. But picking a story out data can be time consuming and expensive and prone to errors. If WikiTribune enables experts and laypeople to collaborate in a productive way then I think it will be an amazing service.
I have lots of thoughts on all of this and am very very very interested to see where it goes. I really hope this is as great as it has the potential to be.