There's been a lot more reflective, humanity stories on HN.
Or maybe I'm just noticing more.
I've been on HN since 2007.
There was that story a few weeks ago with the aging parents and their daughter that took a picture of them waving goodbye, each year she visited.
I like these stories. It gives me pause and to wonder what it's all been for.
Probably for my kids. My second oldest (9) loves creating levels in Geometry Dash. He'll probably be an engineer.
He asks great questions. He can teach himself new tricks from YouTube videos. He asks for critical feedback on his levels. That's a good start.
I'm just rambling.
I feel like the major life events always put our life span into a perspective that otherwise might be missed or overlooked. It makes life feel shorter than it is.
Btw, which post are you referring to? I am curious to read it as well.
It’s also a matter of regret minimization.
9+ times out of 10 when I’m on the fence about going to a major life event and go, I’m glad I did. Can’t think of the last thing I regretted going to.
I’ve certainly missed some like graduations I regret not making it to.
Funerals are towards the top of the list of big life events and I’ve never regretted one.
Big life events are always worth a visit if you get invited, and you always learn something from the mix of people who attend. Whether it's a funeral, wedding, baptism, and so on.
Does this person have friends from childhood? Do his friends come from the same place, or all sorts of places? Do they know each other, or does he have a lot of singletons there?
Who considers themselves close family? Second cousins? Or did their cousins not even come?
How well represented are various social classes?
I always find these things super interesting when I go to one of these.
You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral
You should do it for yourself, out of respect for the person who died and respect for the loved ones remaining. Not out of societal obligation
The corollary to that is there are plenty of times where the right thing is to not go to the funeral. If you lack those things.
There have been times I don’t go the funeral. Because the dead person was a horrible person. When people asked, I said exactly that and many times the response I got was “man I wish I had not gone”
>You should go to the funeral if you think the right thing is to go to the funeral
More broadly, your actions are a reflection of your values. If there's a mismatch, then one of two things must be true: you fell short of your ideals and you should strive to do better in the future, or your stated values really aren't your values.
Always go to the funeral!
It's not for you, and it's not for other people. It's just a thing. It's not an analogy about doing the right thing. It's just going to the funeral. That's what you should do, for lots of reasons. When you do it, you'll know why; maybe later, but you'll know.
I agree with this completely.
A small but important suggested addition: if it's someone who's funeral you would go to, tell that person now what they mean to you. Then they can hear it while they are still alive.
It is not a given that you will have enough time to tell them later.
sometimes, not going to the funeral is the message to be said and saying it to them "now" is considered rude. clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist
The person died, what message can you want to send to a dead person. He/She is dead. He can't hear it. But you can forgive and believe me, feel better about whatever happened that made you want to send a message that would never be received.
> what message can you want to send to a dead person
you ask me that after I said "clearly, the message of not attending is being said to others not to the person, but you get the gist"
so clearly, you didn't get the gist. not attending says something to the other friends/family that did attend. the knee jerk reaction is "what an asshole to not attend" typically followed by "I wonder what happened that would make them not attend". then the gossiping begins and the person sending the message smiles a wry smile
Yeah, I got that. It is just that I think it is now pointless. Like, he/she is dead.
why do you keep referring to the dead person like that's the point of the not going? you're sending a message to those that do go by not going. the subject of the message is the deceased not the recipient.
Ah. I thought you had a beef with the dead.
Ok. I can respect that.
It is just that as I was thinking the dead was the target, it would be better to make sure you get whatever retribution while he is alive.
Wholeheartedly agree with both the nominal and underlying advice here.
Doing the right thing all the time is painful, tedious and can cost you. But doing the wrong thing will cost you too. Both compound.
The literal advice about going to the funeral is about showing up for people who meant something to you. There are only a few special times in your life when you get to see a large chunk of other people's important people:
* graduations
* coming of age ceremonies
* weddings
* funerals
Being there gives you a special chance to know the person better. Just do it.
Funerals aren't for the one who passed they're for the ones left behind. Be there for the ones left behind and remember you are one of the ones left behind.
> By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals.
Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
They say your social cluster is 150 people, so you should be going to about 2 funerals every year (this ignores age-clustering, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that you often go to funerals slightly outside your cluster and the fact that the cluster changes over time).
I don't know if I'd go to the funerals of all 150 people in my set. Most of them are acquaintances rather than friends or family.
I go to much fewer than 2 funerals per year. But now that I'm 55 it will likely start picking up.
>> By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals.
> Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
Not for someone who's young and mostly disconnected from their grandparents' generation. In my case, my family lived far away from pretty much all my relatives, which meant I'm not very close to any of them and going to a funeral meant lots of short-notice plane tickets.
I think I've only gone to two funerals in my life: one grandparent who died geographically close to use when I was a kid, and the father (who I never met) of a friend of mine.
I think it would have been better if it had been different, and I had gone to more funerals, because now my lack of exposure adds a whole extra layer of awkwardness onto dealing with death.
Even if I was close to my grandparents' generation, I only have four of them and that number doesn't increase over time. I don't think I know 16 * 2 = 32 people of my grandparents' generation, especially not now, way past my teenage years.
Really? I'm in my 30s and I've been to fewer than that.
> They say your social cluster is 150 people
Maybe yours is.
Some of us had our family dispatched in bulk, but thanks.
E.g. the article is about their 5th grade math teacher.
>Is it just me or does this actually seem kind of low?
Yes, it's low.
A blatant ad by the funeral services industry.
And no, I don't want my last act on Earth to be inconveniencing people.
Sound advice. Conversely: always have a funeral.
I know several people who expressed a wish not to have a funeral. Sometimes this wish stems from a desire not to be an inconvenience, or a sense of guilt or shame that one's life was not well-lived. Sometimes, simply the view that funerals don't matter, so why bother.
In every case, I think this desire is mistaken. The need to mourn the dead is an instinct older than our species itself, and in dismissing it we wound the people closest to us.
If you're the sort of person to whom the idea of skipping your own funeral sounds tempting, I kindly ask you for the sake of your loved ones that you reconsider.
A memorial service is a very good thing to do, for those left behind.
The body does not need to be present for a memorial, as it is for a funeral. That makes it a somewhat easier event to arrange.
I don't think a significant number of people have ever written a will that actively prevented a funeral. A funeral doesn't require the deceased. It's fine to skip it.
A valid point and a good approach. But it's quite a bad pun when used as a title here on HN - and with the capitalization, too.
What pun/title?
Ecclesiastes 7:4 "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth."
My dad is an atheist but he believes in that. He hates seeing other people happy
Do the right thing even when you really don't want to is a valuable lesson, but I'm not sure I believe that the right thing to do is attend funerals for people who you were not actually close to. It feels extremely insincere.
It's not just whether you were close to the deceased; it's do you know the survivors. I've attended funerals where I never met the deceased but knew a survivor.
Yeah. Went with my cousin-in-law to his grandmother's funeral. I had maybe met her twice. It wasn't for her. Meant a lot to him, though.
I've gone to the funeral of a community leader who I only met a couple of times, but the stories of their life and seeing how they had touched the people around them was inspiring and I hold those stories dearly and feel the loss of the community. Hardly insincere.
I've attended the funerals of my enemies just to pay my respects for the rivalry that we had.
> I've attended the funerals of my enemies just to pay my respects for the rivalry that we had.
What? You have enemies? Like the Joker and Batman or Lex Luthor and Superman?
Honestly, to me, that word describes a kind of relation that mainly exists in comic books and between nation states.