Grief and Programming

Once again I asked, “Father, I want to know what a dying person feels when no one will speak with him, nor be open enough to permit him to speak, about his dying.”
The old man was quiet, and we sat without speaking for nearly an hour. Since he did not bid me leave, I remained. Although I was content, I feared he would not share his wisdom, but he finally spoke. The words came slowly.
“My son, it is the horse on the dining-room table. It is a horse that visits every house and sits on every dining-room table—the tables of the rich and of the poor, of the simple and of the wise. This horse just sits there, but its presence makes you wish to leave without speaking of it. If you leave, you will always fear the presence of the horse. When it sits on your table, you will wish to speak of it, but you may not be able to.

The Dog

I knew when we walked into this room that they didn't have any good news for me. There's a look people have when they are about to give you bad news and this line of vets staring at me had it. We were at Copenhagen University Animal Hospital, the best veterinary clinic in Denmark. I had brought Pixel, my corgi here, after a long series of unlikely events had each ended with the worst possible scenario. It started with a black lump on his skin.

We had moved Pixel from Chicago to Denmark, a process that involved a lot of trips to the vet, so when the lump appeared we noticed quickly. A trip to our local vet reassured us though, who took a look, prescribed antibiotics and told us to take him home and keep it clear. It didn't take long for us to realize something worse was happening. He kept scratching the thing open, dripping blood all over the house. My wife and I would wrestle with him in the bathroom every night after we put our newborn baby to bed, trying to clean the wound with the angled squirt bottle we had purchased to help my wife heal after childbirth. He ended up bandaged up and limping around, blood slowly seeping through the bandages.

After a few days the wound started to smell and we insisted the vet take another look. She glanced at it, proclaimed it was extremely seriously and had us to go to the next tier of care. They took care of the lump but told me "we are sure it is cancer" after taking a look at a sample of what they removed. I did some research and was convinced that, yes while it might be cancer, the chances of it being dangerous were slim. It wasn't uncommon for dogs to develop these lumps and since it had been cleanly removed with good margins, we had a decent chance.

Except we didn't. This nice woman, the professor of animal oncology looked at me while Pixel wandered around the room glancing suspiciously at the vet students. I marveled how calm they seemed as she delivered the news. He wasn't going to get better. She didn't know how much time I had. It wasn't going to be a long time. "Think months, not years" she said trying to reassure me that I at least had some time.

For a month after I was in a fog, just trying to cope with the impending loss of my friend. This vision I had that my daughter would know this dog and get to experience him was fading, replacing with the sad reality of a stainless steel table and watching a dog breath his last breath, transforming into a fur rug before your eyes. It was something I had no illusions about, having just done it with our cat who was ill.

Certainly, this would be the worst of it. My best friend, this animal that had come with me from Chicago to Denmark and kept me company alone for the first month of my time in the country. This dog who I had purchased in a McDonald's parking lot from a woman who assured me he "loved cocktail wieners and Law and Order", this loss would be enough. I could survive this and recover.

I was wrong though. This was just the beginning of the suffering.

Over the next three months I would be hit with a series of blows unlike anything I've ever experienced. In fast succession I would lose all but one of my grandparents, my brother would admit he suffered from a serious addiction to a dangerous drug and my mother would get diagnosed with a hard-to-treat cancer. You can feel your world shrink as you endlessly play out the worst case scenario time after time.

I found myself afraid to answer the phone, worried that this call would be the one that gave me the final piece of bad news. At the same time, I became desperate for distractions. Anything I could throw myself into, be it reading or writing or playing old PS1 videogames and losing over and over. Finally I hit on something that worked and I wanted to share with the rest of you.

Programming is something that distracted me in a way that nothing else did. It is difficult enough to require your entire focus yet rewarding enough that you still get the small bursts of "well at least I got something done". I'll talk about what I ended up making and what I'm working on, some trial and error I went through and some ideas for folks desperate for something, anything, to distract them from the horrors.

Since this is me, the first thing I did was do a ton of research. I don't know why this is always my go-to but here we are. You read the blog of an obsessive, this is what you get.

What is Grief?

At a basic level, grief is simply the term that indicates one's reactions to loss. When one suffers a large loss, you experience grief. More specifically grief refers to the heavy toll that weighs on the bereaved. We often discuss it in the context of emotions, the outpouring of feelings that is the most pronounced sign of grief.

In popular culture grief is often presented as 5 stages which include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These are often portrayed as linear, with each person passing through one to get to the other. More modern literature presents a different model. Worden suggested in 2002 that we think of grief as being a collection of tasks, rather than stages. The tasks are as follows:

1. Accept the reality of the loss
2. Work through the pain of grief
3. Adjust to an environment in which the deceased is missing
4. To emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life.

One thing we don't discuss a lot with grief is the oscillation between two different sets of coping mechanisms. This is something Stroebe and Schut (1999) discussed at length, that there is a loss oriented coping mechanism and a restoration oriented coping mechanism for loss.

What this suggests is that, contrary to some discourse on the topic, you should anticipate needing to switch between two different mental modes. There needs to be part of you that is anticipating the issues you are going to face, getting ready to be useful for the people you care about who are suffering.

Aren't these people still alive?

Yes, so why am I so mentally consumed with thinking about this? Well it turns out there is a term for this called "anticipatory grief". First introduced by Lindemann (1944), it's been a topic in the academic writings around grief ever since. At a basic level it is just grief that happens before but in relation to impending death. It is also sometimes referred to as "anticipatory mourning".

One thing that became clear talking to people who have been through loss and death and experienced similar feelings of obsession over the loss before it happened is it doesn't take the place of actual grieving and mourning. This shook me to my core. I was going to obsess over this for years and it was going to happen, then I was going to still go through the same process.

The other thing that made me nervous was how many people reported chronic grief reactions. These are the normal stages of grief, only they are prolonged in duration and do not lead to a reasonable outcome. You get stuck in the grieving process. This is common enough that it is being proposed as a new DSM category of Attachment Disorders. For those that are curious, here are the criteria:

• Criterion A. Chronic and disruptive yearning, pining, and longing for the deceased
• Criteria B. The person must have four of the following eight remaining symptoms at least several times a day or to a degree intense enough to be distressing and disruptive:

1. Trouble accepting the death
2. Inability to trust others
3. Excessive bitterness or anger related to the death
4. Uneasiness about moving on
5. Numbness/detachment
6. Feeling life is empty or meaningless without the deceased
7. Envisioning a bleak future
8. Feeling agitated

• Criterion C. The above symptom disturbance must cause marked and persistent dysfunction in social, occupational, or other important domains
• Criterion D. The above symptom disturbance must last at least six months

Clearly I needed to get ready to settle in for the long haul if I was going to be of any use to anyone.

After talking to a support group it was clear the process really has no beginning or end. They emphasized getting a lot of sleep and trying to keep it as regular as possible. Don't end up trapped in the house for days not moving. Set small goals and basically be cautious, don't make any giant changes or decisions.

We talked about what a lot of them did and much of the discussion focused around a spiritual element. I'm not spiritual in any meaningful way. While I can appreciate the architecture of a church or a place of worship, seeking a higher power has never been a large part of my life. For the less religious a lot of them talking about creative outlets. These seemed more reasonable to me. "You should consider poetry" one man said. I didn't want to tell him I don't think I've ever really read poetry, much less written it.

What even is "focus" and "distractions"

I'm not going to lie. I figured I would add this section as a fun "this is how distractions and focus works in the human mind" with some graphs and charts. After spending a few days reading through JSTOR I had no such simple charts or graphs. The exact science behind how our minds work, what is focus and what is a distraction is a complicated topic so far beyond my ability to give it justice that it is laughable.

So here is my DISCLAIMER. As far as I can tell, we do not know how information is processed, stored or recalled in the brain. We also aren't sure how feelings or thinking even works. To even begin to answer these questions, you would need to be an expert in a ton of disciplines which I'm not. I'm not qualified to teach you anything about any topic related to the brain.

Why don't we know more about the human brain? Basically neurons are extremely small and the brain is very complicated. Scientists have been working on mapping the brain for 40 years with smaller organisms with some success. The way scientists seem to study this is: define the behavior, identify neurons involved in that behavior, finally agitate those neurons to see their role in changing the behavior. This is called "circuit dynamics". You can see a really good write-up here.

As you add complexity to the brain being studied, drawing these connections get more and more complicated. Our tools have improved as well, allowing us to tag neurons with different genes so they show up as different colors when studied to better understand their relationship in more complex creatures.

Anyway brains are really complicated and a lot of the stuff we repeat back to each other about how they work is, at best, educated guesses and at worst deliberately misleading. The actual scientific research happening in the field is still very much in the "getting a map of the terrain" step.

Disclaimer understood get on with it

Our brains are constantly being flooded with information from every direction. Somehow our mind has a tool to enable us to focus on one piece of information and filter out the distractions. When we focus on something, the electrical activity of the neocortex changes. The neurons there stop signalling in-sync and start firing out of order.

Why? Seemingly to allow us to let the neurons respond to different information in different ways. This means I can focus on your voice and filter out the background noise of the coffee shop. It seems the cholinergic system (don't stress I also had never heard of it) plays a large role in allowing this sync/out of sync behavior to work.

It turns out the cholinergic system regulates a lot of stuff. It handles the sensory processing, attention, sleep, and a lot more. You can read a lot more about it here. This system seems to be what is broadcasting to the brain "this is the thing you need to be focused on".

So we know that there is a system, based in science, to how focus and distraction work. However that isn't the only criteria that our minds use to judge whether a task was good or bad. We also rely on dopamine source floating around in our skulls to tell us "was that thing worth the effort we put into it". In order for the distraction to do what I wanted it had to be engrossing enough to trigger my brain into focusing on it and also giving me the dopamine to keep me invested.

The Nature of the Problem

There is a reality when you start to lose your family that is unlike anything I've ever experienced. You are being uprooted, the world you knew before is disappearing. The jokes change, the conversation change, you and the rest of your family have a different relationship now. Grief is a cruel teacher.

There is nothing gentle about feeling these entities in your life start to fade away. Quickly you discover that you lack the language for these conversations, long pauses on the phone while you struggle to offer anything up that isn't a glib stupid greeting card saying.

Other people lack the language too and it is hard to not hate them for it. I feel a sense of obligation to give the people expressing their sadness to me something, but I already know as I start talking that I don't have it. People are quick to offer up information or steps, which I think is natural, but the nature of illness is you can't really "work the problem". The Americans obsess on what hospital network she got into, the Danes obsess on how is she feeling.

You find yourself regretting all the certainty you had before. There was an idea of your life and that idea, as it turns out, had very little propping it up. For all the years invested in one view of the universe, this is far bigger. I'm not in it yet, but I can see its edges and interacting with people who are churning in its core scares me. My mind used to wander endlessly, but no more. Left to its own devices it will succumb to intense darkness.

Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

Outside of the crisis you try and put together the memories and pieces into some sort of story. Was I good to Pixel? Did I pay enough attention to the stories my grandparents told me, the lessons and the funny bits? What kind of child was I? You begin to try and put them together into some sort of narrative, some way of explaining it to other people, but it falls apart. I can't edit without feeling dishonest. Without editing it becomes this jumble of words and ideas without a beginning or end.

I became afraid of my daughter dying in a way I hadn't before. Sure I had a lot of fear going into the birth process and I was as guilty as anyone of checking on her breathing 10 times a night at first. The first night with her in the hospital, me lying there on a bed staring at the ceiling while our roommate sobbed through the night, her boyfriend and baby snoozing away peacefully, I felt this fear for the first time. But I dealt with it, ran the numbers, looked at the stats, did the research.

Now I feel cursed with the knowledge that someone has to be the other percent. Never did I really think I was blessed, but I had managed to go so long without a disaster that it felt maybe like I would continue to skate forever. Then they hit all at once, stacked on each other. Children can die from small falls, choking on reasonable pieces of food or any of a million other things. Dropping her off at daycare for the first time, I felt the lack of control and almost turned around.

You can't curse your children to carry your emotional weight though. It is yours, the price of being an adult. My parents never did and I'm not going to be the first. A lot of stuff talks about solving grief but that's not even how this really works. You persist through these times, waiting for the phone call you know is coming. That's it, there isn't anything else to do or say about it. You sit and you wait and you listen to people awkwardly try to reassure you in the same way you once did to others.

Why Programming?

Obviously I need something to distract me. Like a lot of people in the tech field, I tend to hobby-bounce. I had many drawers full of brief interests where I would obsess over something for a month or so, join the online community for it, read everything I could find about it and then drop it hard. When I moved from Chicago to Denmark though, all that stuff had to go. Condense your life down to a cargo container and very soon you need to make hard choices about what comes and what gets donated. This all means that I had to throw out any idea which involved the purchase of a lot of stuff.

Some other obvious stuff was out unfortunately. Denmark doesn't have a strong volunteering movement, which makes sense in the context of "if the job is worth doing you should probably pay someone to do it". My schedule with a small child wasn't amendable to a lot of hours spent outside of the house with the exception of work.

My list of requirements looked like this:

• Not a big initial financial investment
• Flexible schedule
• Gave me the feeling of "making something"
• Couldn't take up a lot of physical space

How to make it different from work

From the beginning I knew I had to make this different from what I do at work. I write code at work, I didn't want this to turn into something where I end up working on stuff for work at all hours. So I laid out a few basic rules to help keep the two things separate from get.

• Use the absolute latest bleeding beta release of the programming language. Forget stability, get all the new features.
• Don't write tests. I love TDD but I didn't want this to be "a work product".
• Do not think about if you are going to release it into the public. If you want to later, go for it, but often when I'm working on a small fun project I get derailed thinking "well I need tests and CI and to use the correct framework and ensure I have a good and simple process for getting it running" etc etc.
• Try to find projects where there would be a good feedback loop of seeing progress.
• If something isn't interesting, just stop it immediately.

I started with a tvOS app.The whole OS exists to basically play video content, it is pretty easy to write and test and plus it is fun. Very quickly I felt it working, this distraction where I felt subconsciously I was allowed to be distracted because "this is productive and educational". It removed the sense of guilt I had when I was playing videogames or reading a book, tortured by a sense of "you should be focusing more on the members of your family that are going through this nightmare".

The tutorial I followed was this one. Nothing but good things to say about the experience, but I found a lot of the layout stuff to not really do much for me. I've never been that interested in CSS or web frontend work, not that it isn't valuable work I just don't have an eye for it. On to the next thing then.

From there I switched to GUI apps based in large part on this post. I use CLI tools all the time, it might be nice to make simple Python GUIs of commonly used tools for myself. I started small and easy, since I really wanted to get a fast feeling of progress.

The only GUI framework I've ever used before is tkinter which is convenient because it happens to be an idiot-proof GUI design. Here's the basic Hello World example:

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import ttk
root = Tk()
frm = ttk.Frame(root, padding=10)
frm.grid()
ttk.Label(frm, text="Hello World!").grid(column=0, row=0)
ttk.Button(frm, text="Quit", command=root.destroy).grid(column=1, row=0)
root.mainloop()

Immediately you should see some great helpful hints. First it's a grid, so adding or changing the relative position of the label is easy. Second we have a lot of flexibility with things that can sometimes be a problem with GUIs like auto-resizing.

Adding window.columnconfigure(i, weight=1, minsize=75) and window.rowconfigure(i, weight=1, minsize=50) allows us to quickly add resizing and by changing the weights we can change which column or row grows at what rate.

For those unaware of how GUI apps work, it's mostly based on Events and Event Handlers. Sometimes happens (a click or the keyboard is pressed) and you execute something as a result. See the Quit button above for a basic example. Very quickly you can start making fun little GUI apps that do whatever you want. The steps look like this:

1. Import tkinter and make a new window

import tkinter as tk

window = tk.Tk()

window.title("Your Sweet App")

window.resizable(width=False, height=False)

Make a widget with a label and assign it to a Frame
start = tk.Frame(master=window)
output_value = tk.Entry(master=start, width=10)
input = tk.Label(master=start, text="whatever")

Set up your layout, add a button to trigger an action and then define a function which you call on the Button with the command argument.

Have no idea what I'm talking about? No worries, I just did this tutorial and an hour later I was back up and running. You can make all sorts of cool stuff with Ttk and Tkinter.

Defining functions to run basically shell commands and output their value was surprisingly fun. I started with real basic ones like host.

1. Check to make sure it exists with shutil.which link
2. Run the command and format the output
3. Display in the GUI.

After that I made a GUI to check DKIM, SPF and DMARC. Then a GUI for seeing all your AWS stuff and deleting it if you wanted to. A simple website uptime checker that made a lambda for each new website you added in AWS and then had the app check an SQS queue when it opened to confirm the status. These things weren't really useful but they were fun and different.

The trick is to think of them like toys. They're not projects like you have at work, it's like Legos in Python. It's not serious and you can do whatever you want with them. I made a little one to check if any of the local shops had a bunch of hard to find electronics for sale. I didn't really want the electronics but it burned a lot of time.

Checking in

After this I just started including anything random I felt like including. Config files in TOML, storing state in SQLite, whatever seemed interesting. All of it is super easy in Python and with the GUI you get that really nice instant feedback. I'm not pulling containers or doing anything that requires a ton of setup. It is all super fast. This has become a nice nightly ritual. I get to sit there, open up the tools that I've come to know well, and very slowly change these various little GUIs. It's difficult enough to fully distract, to suck my whole mind into it.

I can't really tell you what will work for you, but hopefully this at least provided you with some idea of something that might work for you. I wish I had something more useful to say to people reading this suffering. I'm sorry. It seems the only sentiment I have heard that is honest.