Posts in the General Category

Being here, in the same vacation spot we were last year when Rebecca fell ill, wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be… until last Friday, August 15th, the first anniversary of her seizures and life flight to CHOP.

That night, the next day, and the days since were much more difficult for me, as we moved through the anniversaries of her first and second surgeries.  Today is the anniversary of the third, when they implanted the drainage tube that probably kept her functional and complete until the last few days of her life.

These days have been so difficult because I’ve been experiencing what I’ve come to refer to as “divergence stress”.  I feel as though last year’s August and this year’s are running in parallel, branching from this past Friday.  I am here, sitting in our rental, looking at the beach and the ocean waves, and feel as though another of me is up in Philadelphia, gaunt and teary-eyed in a dim intensive care ward and hoping against hope that our daughter will survive, while I sit in sunshine and luxury, wondering why I am not with my little girl who so desperately needs me right now, who I so desperately want to hold and talk with again.

Or worse, that another me isn’t up in Philadelphia, but Rebecca still is, lying unconscious and alone in the intensive care unit.  As though the loop has restarted, but I have stepped out of it, abandoning my baby to her cancer.

I know this isn’t the truth.  She is not there.  We are not there.  We are here, now, and she is not.

But someone else, right now, as you read this, is there.  Another family is assembling around a PICU bed, surrounding their child and hoping against hope and sick, choking fear that their beloved will survive.  Maybe they will.  Many do.

That family, and all the families still to come, need research to give their children a better chance to live.  Many of them will need a place to stay while their child endures weeks or months of surgeries and treatments, just as we did.

To that end, our friends Nancy Massey and Kimberly Blessing have launched a fundraiser with two aims.  The first is to support research into pediatric brain cancer.  The second is to sponsor a room at the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House for a year.  The $10,000 fundraising goal will allow both.  Going beyond that goal will make it possible to support even more research.

It’s not much to make sure those other families have a welcoming place to stay and a better chance at continued life than we did.  If you can, please make a contribution.

• Divergence was published on Wednesday, August 20th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the Cancer, General, and Rebecca categories.
• There have been two replies.

I’m sad about Robin Williams.  I was also a little bit angry with him.  In much the same way, I was sad about and angry with Chloe Weil when news of her suicide reached me.

Yes.  Angry.  It took some time and help from a friend to work out why: because Kat and I just spent most of a year doing everything in our power to save our daughter’s life, and now here was someone just throwing that away.

Here’s the thing: they did not throw their lives away.  Both of them were suffering from a disease: depression.  That disease made them feel unloved and worthless despite any and all evidence to the contrary.  And they each eventually, despite years of trying to treat and deal with it, died from that disease.

I know this because I have a milder form of that same disease, one that rises and falls in slow, multi-year-long cycles.  I have spent time on SSRIs.  There are times I have gone to counseling.  I have contemplated ending my own life, though only abstractly, never in a detailed or direct manner.  I’ve never in my adult life had suicidal ideation and a plan.  Robin and Chloe did.  They had a disease much, much stronger than I do.

But that’s where my anger really came from: my own depression.  The same lying impulses that sometimes, not often, but sometimes make me feel worthless and unlovable also pushed me to be angry at these people who had the same disease, and died of it.  It lied to me that they had failed.  And for a little while, I believed that lie.

That reaction made as much sense as being angry at Rebecca for having cancer, as thinking that she failed to fight hard enough to live.  It was not their fault.  I know this first-hand… and yet, I believed the lie.

This is another sign that I have it much milder than they did: I could eventually, with some self-inspection backed by decades of experience, recognize the lie for what it was, and dispose of it.  Not everyone has that ability, no matter how much self-inspection and experience they may have.  Not because they are weak or foolish, but because they literally cannot do it, any more than a cancer patient can verbally order the tumors to leave them alone.

I have been lucky.  The disease is mild enough in me that I am still here, and have only sometimes needed pharmacological and psychological help.  That is not because I am strong.  That is because my disease is not strong.  I have still needed and obtained that help, and I feel no shame for that.  If you need help, please get help.  There is no shame in it, no matter what the disease tells you.  If it tells you that seeking help is failure, it is lying.  If it tells you that being sad is weakness, it is lying.  If it tells you that death is preferable to life, it is lying.

It is not shameful to feel depressed.  It is not weak to feel like you want to give up.  It is not failure to ask for help.  There are resources in almost every city of every advanced country — not enough, to be sure, but they are there.  Please use them, especially if you already have a plan to end the pain.  In America, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at (800) 273-8255, or (800) 273-TALK.  You will be connected with a skilled, trained counselor at a crisis center in your area, any hour of the day or night.

If you know of a similar resource in another country, or other resources in America, please leave a comment with the details.  It could help someone right when they need it most.

Update 11 Aug 14: here’s a list of suicide prevention services throughout the world from the International Association for Suicide Prevention.  If you know of one not on the list, the comments are still open (and you should also let the IASP know!).  And information about depression treatment services, not just suicide prevention, is also welcome.

• Depression was published on Monday, August 11th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the General and Personal categories.
• There have been ten replies.

Below is the eulogy I delivered at Rebecca’s funeral, as I wrote it.  I hope that what I actually said matches the text.  The same deep shock that let me speak also prevented me from retaining any clear memory of what I said, and I’m not ready to watch the archived recording of the service to find out.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.  I hope I will — to see Carolyn’s tribute to her sister, if nothing else.

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Rebecca was fierce.  She beat adults in staring contests when she was two weeks old.  Rebecca was joyful.  Her laugh could fill a room and bring a smile to anyone who heard it.  Rebecca was stubborn.  She would often refuse to give in, even when it cost her something she wanted.  Rebecca was kind, and loving, and mischievous, and oh so very ticklish.

She vibrated with energy.  Her philosophy was essentially: never walk when you can skip, never skip when you can run, never run when you can dance, and never dance when you can hide yourself around the next corner and then laughingly yell “BOO!” when everyone else finally catches up with you.

She loved to steal our phones and wallets and keys from our pockets, not to hide them away or do anything mean or malicious, but to wave them in front of us and laugh her way through an affectionate, singsong tease.  If there’s a world beyond this one, I hope whoever’s in charge has secured all the valuables.  Not to prevent her from swiping them, which would be an impossible goal, but because she would be disappointed and bored if they were too easy to swipe.

Rebecca is not an angel, nor would she wish to be.  If anything, Rebecca is now a poltergeist.  On her sixth birthday, we had planned to go to Cedar Point that day and the next.  Instead, that was the day she died… and on that day, a water main break closed Cedar Point for the entire weekend, because if she couldn’t go, then nobody gets to go.  And in brief conversation this morning, I was literally about to say the words “lose electricity” when the power went out in our house.

The little stinker.

One of the hardest things for us in the last few weeks of her life was seeing how the tumor slowly and inexorably took all that sass and spice away from her.  The loss of energy and emotion was horrible.  We had fought so long and hard to keep her quality of life normal, and we had succeeded.  It was only at the very end, just the last few days, that she moved beyond our ability to preserve it.

Underneath it all, she was still Rebecca.  She got mad at her sister and brother because they would get to stay us and she wouldn’t, and then she forgave them because she understood it wasn’t their fault and she loved them so much.  She gave us disdainful looks when she thought our attempts to tease her were lame.  She asked, wordlessly but clearly, to hear her favorite stories.  She told us she didn’t love us because she wanted to push us away, to lessen our pain.  But when we explained to her that the joy of loving her was worth any pain, and that we could never stop loving her regardless, she relented and admitted the truth that we had never doubted.  The last words and gestures that passed between us were of love.

In her last hours, she was surrounded by love, her room filled with people who loved her as she loved them, never leaving her alone for a second.  We held and snuggled her all the way to the end, all of us together.  And the people in that room were surrounded by the love of those who loved them, and they by those who loved them.  All of that love focused on Rebecca.  She deserved it.  But then, so does every child.

Now she is gone, and we who remain are devastated.  It is only together that we will move forward.  Community has sustained us the past months, and made it possible for us to do everything we could for Rebecca and Carolyn and Joshua.  Community will help us get through this.  Our hearts have been broken into uncountable pieces, but we will help pick up those pieces together.  I am beyond heartbroken that she is gone, but I will never, not for an instant, ever regret that she came into our home and our lives.

What matters in this life is not what we do but what we do for others, the legacy we leave and the imprint we make.  Her time may have been short, but her spark illuminated so much in that time, touched and warmed so many people, and for the rest of our days we will all be changed for the better.

• Eulogy was published on Saturday, June 14th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the General and Rebecca categories.
• There have been twenty replies.

Rebecca Alison Meyer, adored daughter of Kathryn (née Fradkin) and Eric Meyer.  Beloved sister of Carolyn and Joshua.  Loving granddaughter of Arthur and Cathy Meyer, Steven and Sandy Fradkin, and the late Carol Meyer and Ada Fradkin.  Rebecca was a cherished niece, cousin, god-daughter, and friend.

Services will be held Thursday, 12 June 2014 at 3:00pm at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple, located at 23737 Fairmount Boulevard, Beachwood, Ohio.  Interment will be at Mayfield Cemetery in Cleveland Heights.  The family will observe Shiva at their Cleveland Heights residence Thursday (following services) until 9:00pm; and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 3:00pm–7:00pm.  A brief minyan will be held Thursday night, and Saturday and Sunday at 2:30pm.

The family requests charitable donations be made in Rebecca’s name to the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House or the St. Baldrick’s Foundation.  They further request that those who attend the services and are comfortable wearing purple do so in honor of Rebecca and her favorite color.

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If you have a mind to be there, please know that you are welcome — adults and children alike — to the service, interment, and Shiva.  Community has sustained us, and anyone who wishes to be there should be there.  Those traveling to attend should look to the Chagrin/I-271 area for lodging, which is very near Anshe Chesed and near to our home as well.  The service may be live-streamed — apparently that’s a thing our temple does these days — but I can’t be certain that the technology will cooperate.

I will update this post as necessary.

• In Memoriam was published on Monday, June 9th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the Cancer, General, and Rebecca categories.
• There have been one hundred seventy-two replies.

Last night, Kris Straub of webcomic fame, most recently the excellent Broodhollow, did something that I’d always suspected might be possible, but hadn’t figured out where to go to make it happen.  He showed me the way, and so I (once again) bow to him in reverence.  I’ll illustrate what he did with the following image of a two-item list (more on why I used in image in just a moment).  The first item in the list uses markup and CSS.  The second does not.

The first list item, as I said, uses elements and CSS: em and strong, plus all the styles that apply to them.  The second item uses Unicode symbols from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols range of Unicode, U+1D400 through U+D7FF.  (See also a PDF from the Unicode Consortium, if you’re into that kind of thing.)

You can see the test file that was used to produce the image, and you definitely should see it if you’re thinking about using this technique.  It’s not as straightforward as might first appear.  For example, the reason I have an image with a link to a testcase is that some combination of WordPress, PHP, or MySQL refuses to allow me to put the raw Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols into this post.  Every time I tried, everything from the first such symbol onward was just dropped completely when I saved a draft of the post.

The fun part is that any service that supports Unicode and doesn’t have those sort of glitches — say, Twitter or Facebook — can serve up those symbols in a tweet or a post, thus allowing you to add italics, boldfacing, fraktur, and other “faces” to your social networking.  At that point, it’s up to the user agent and OS to render the symbols, if they can.

And lots of them can, at least on the desktop.  My limited survey revealed that most Windows 7 and 8 browsers are fine, though not Chrome; Windows XP, on the other hand, saw broad failure.  OS X browsers, no problems; ditto various flavors of Linux.  On the other hand, iOS and Android mostly saw failures, but apparently some clients were okay, so the failures might be problems with individual clients and not the OS.  Nobody let me know how Opera Mini did.  If you’re inclined to report your results for the test file, feel free in the comments, though please check to see if your browser/OS combo has already been reported before you do (and if you got a different result that someone with the same combo, definitely report your result!).

The real problem likely comes in accessibility, as Chris Lilley pointed out: “Chance of screen reader understanding, near zero.”  Could someone test that theory and report the results in the comments?  I’d be very interested to know what happens.

I’m not recommending that people do this, to be clear.  The Unicode support issues alone are enough to discourage use, and if the accessibility problem holds, that’s an even stronger disincentive.  But who knows?  Maybe in a few years, both problems will have been resolved and social media clients will let us boldface, italicize, fraktur, and even double-stroke our little e-missions.

• Unicoding Font Styles was published on Wednesday, January 15th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Some of our Cleveland friends have organized “Team Becca” as part of the 2013 Northeast Ohio CureSearch Walk for Children’s Cancer to be held in University Circle on the morning of Saturday, September 28.  If anyone would like to join and walk the 1.75 mile course, please do; if you can’t join as a walker, please consider making a small donation to the team as a show of support.  It would be much appreciated.

Kat and I hope to participate in the walk with Rebecca, but we won’t be able to commit until a week or so before the event.  Basically, until we know our exact schedule and how Rebecca reacts to the sedation-and-radiation-and-chemotherapy regimen, we can’t commit to much of anything.  But our friends will be there, and hopefully some of you will be there (either in person or in spirit), and if at all possible we’ll be there too.

• Team Becca was published on Thursday, August 29th, 2013.
• It was assigned to the Cancer, General, Personal, and Rebecca categories.
• There has been one reply.

As I was reading an article with a few scattered apostrophe errors, I wished that I could highlight each one, hit a report button, and know that the author had been notified of the errors so that they could fix them.  No requirement to leave a comment chastising them for bad grammar, replete with lots of textual context so they could find the errors — just a quick “hey, I spotted this error, now you know so you can fix it” notice, sent in private to them.

Then I realized that I wanted that for my own site, to let people tell me when I had gaffes in need of repair.  It’s an almost-wiki, where the crowd can flag errors that need to be corrected without having to edit the source themselves — or have the power to edit it themselves, for that matter, which is an open door for abuse.

I haven’t thought this through in tons of detail, but here’s how it feels in my head:

• Visitors highlight a typo and click a button to report it.  Or else click a button to start reporting, highlight a word, and click again to submit.  This part is kind of fuzzy in my head, and yes, “click” is not the best term here, but it’s one we all understand.
• Interesting extra feature: the ability to classify the type of error when reporting.  For example: apostrophe, misspelling, parallelism, pronoun trouble.
• Other interesting extra feature: the ability to inform users of the ground rules before they report.  For example: “This site uses British punctuation rules, the Oxford comma, and American spelling.”  (Which I do.)
• The author gets notice whenever an error is reported, or else can opt for a daily digest.
• Each notice lets the author quickly accept or reject the reported error, much as can be done with edits in MS Word and similar programs, along with a link that will jump the author straight to the reported error so they can see it in context.  If rejected, future reports of that word are disabled.  If accepted, the change is made immediately, without requiring a dive into the CMS.
• When an error is reported, future visitors to the site will see any already-reported errors in highlight.  This keeps them from reporting the same thing over and over, and also acts as incentive to the author to fix errors quickly.  (The highlight style could be customizable.)
• Reports can only happen at the word level, not the individual letter level.  So reporting an “it’s” error highlights all of “it’s”, not just the offending apostrophe.  Perhaps also for multiple words, though only up to a certain number, like three.  And yes, I’m keenly aware of the challenges of defining a “word” in an internationally-aware manner, but perhaps in ideographic languages you switch to per-symbol.  (Not an expert here, so take that with a few grinders of salt.)
• The author can optionally limit the number of reports permitted per hour/day/whatever.  This could be enforced globally or on a per-user basis, though globally is a tad more robust.

That’s how I see it working, after a few minutes’ thought.  It seems pretty achievable as a CMS plugin, actually, though I confess that I don’t have anywhere close to the time and coding chops needed to make it happen right now (or any time soon).  The biggest challenge to me seems like the “edit-on-accept-without-CMS-diving” part, since there are so many CMSes and particularly since static sites are staging a comeback.  Still, I think it would be a fun and worthwhile project for someone out there.  If somebody takes it on, I’d love to follow along and see where it ends up, particularly if they do it for WordPress (which is what the blog hereabouts runs on).

• Collective Editorial: the Plugin was published on Tuesday, May 28th, 2013.
• It was assigned to the General, Tech, and Tools categories.
• There have been sixteen replies.

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• When Spambots Break, We Fisk It was published on Thursday, October 18th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the General category.
• There have been seven replies.