Thoughts From Eric Archive

I remember her last breaths.
I remember how she methodically ate every last scrap of frosting from her birthday cupcake.
I remember her eating Sasa fries and looking with affection at little Joey, who’d come to her last meal.
I remember the last sentence she ever spoke.
I remember her singing and blowing out the candles at her sixth birthday party.
I remember her many laughs — gleeful with mischief, wild with delight, brimming with amusement.
I remember how her whole body shook when she laughed.
I remember how ticklish she was, and how much she loved being tickled.
I remember when she had finally grown enough that her fingers could interlace with mine when we held hands.
I remember the quiver of her lip as we told her there was no special medicine.
I remember her screaming “YES!!!” when we told her we’d bought season passes to Cedar Point.
I remember how she would oppose and defy us even when it cost her something she wanted.
I remember how she insisted on doing everything herself, insisting she needed no help even when she clearly did.
I remember how she would respond to my jokes in a flat, unimpressed voice: “Seriously?”
I remember how she’d cheat at every game and laugh about it as she did.
I remember playing air hockey with her.
I remember how much she loved to wear sparkly princess dresses.
I remember snowflakes stuck in her curly hair.
I remember her sticking her tongue out at me.
I remember her learning to read and write her name.
I remember how she nearly always threw up a hand to block me taking pictures of her.
I remember her painting her own nails for the first time.
I remember how much she loved to have her face painted.
I remember her squealing with delight when we told the kids we were going to Disney World.
I remember sitting on the porch roof with her and her siblings, watching the clouds and waving to people on the sidewalk below.
I remember her arms locked tight around my neck in a squeezy hug.
I remember her snuggled into my lap as I read her a book.
I remember her huddled against me and flinching every time a firework burst.
I remember how she would nod her head with studied nonchalance and say in an offhand, half-dismissive tone, “Yeah, cool, Dad.”
I remember how much she loved and looked up to and emulated her big sister.
I remember how much she loved and played with and protected her little brother.
I remember how she loved watermelon so much she’d eat half a melon by herself and then say she was too full for dinner.
I remember how she danced through life at every turn.
I remember her unbounded joy.
I remember how her body strained against my arms when I had to restrain her, to keep her from hitting, screaming her defiance until I wore her down.
I remember how she jumped waves at the beach, flinging herself into the air with no thought of how she would land, no concern except to jump over the crest as high as possible.
I remember her shouting “Watch me!” before jumping from the pool’s edge to her mother’s arms.
I remember how much she loved to splash in any pool or a puddle or any body of water.
I remember her playing in a big box of styrofoam packing peanuts, shrieking with delight.
I remember how she would grab my thumbs and climb up my front until she was standing on my shoulders, giggling all the way.
I remember her nestled into a sling on her mother’s back, peeking out at the world with a sly grin.
I remember how she used to carefully stick a raspberry on each fingertip before eating them one at a time, again and again.
I remember her feeding a giraffe.
I remember how much she loved coffee.
I remember her throwing rings at the bottles on the boardwalk.
I remember her trying to wash the dishes when she was barely tall enough to stand on a stepstool and see into the sink.
I remember her sitting in the car at the sledding hill, warming her hands against the air grating and waiting for us to be done.
I remember how she always wanted to drive the car.
I remember how she waited for her first birthday party to take her first steps, so she’d have as big an audience as possible.
I remember how she would call to her sister: “Lerlyn! Ah ooo?”
I remember her sister stamping the papers that finalized her adoption.
I remember the gleam in her two-week-old eyes that made me call her “Little Spark”.
I remember how wide and clear her big brown eyes always were.
I remember the first time I ever saw her, asleep in a car seat in a trailer home in a park in the middle of a cornfield in the middle of Ohio.
I remember how joyful I was when I picked her up and nestled her in my arms.
I remember how scared I was.
I remember.

• Afterimage was published on Sunday, June 7th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Rebecca categories.
• There have been five replies.

I’m sitting on the love seat on my front porch.  It’s a beautiful spring day, the blue sky flecked with a few wispy clouds — certainly not enough to dim the sun’s warmth even when they do drift in front of it.  There’s a slight breeze stirring the clean June air, almost but not quite cool enough in the shade to call for a sweatshirt.

The feel of the air on my skin, the smell of spring, the sounds of the neighborhood, the sun and temperature, all exactly the same as they were one year ago today, and the combined sense of parallel and divergence is intense.

We had just started our meeting with the rabbi, upstairs in the library, beginning to discuss the details of the memorial service we knew we could not avoid, when our friends shouted up in panicked voices that something was wrong with Rebecca.  By the time we reached the porch, she was almost unconscious.  There had been a seizure, a small one, but we assumed it was the first of many.  We called the hospice nurse and then Kat and I sat to either side of her on the love seat, snuggling in close.  For more than an hour, Rebecca seemed to be asleep, and yet was, at some level, still aware.  When Kat tried to shift her arm, Rebecca reached up, never even opening her eyes, to pull it back around her shoulders.

So we kept talking to her, telling her how much we loved her, how much everyone loved her, going through all their names again and again.  Telling her stories about herself, favorite memories of hers and ours.  Telling her we were with her all the way to end, all of us together.  Telling her that she could stop fighting.  Telling her she could go.

She never stirred, except to make sure Kat’s arm stayed around her.  And after an hour or two, even that ceased.  Her body was completely limp, her breath steady but slow and getting slower.

We were sure she was going to die that sunny spring afternoon, in the shade of our porch, surrounded by our love, just shy of turning six.

And then, late in the afternoon, she suddenly stirred and sat up, her eyes open.  “Hey,” I said to her, and I remember how my voice was filled with wonder and surprise.  “Hey there, Little Spark.  Did you take a nap?”

She nodded.

“Would you like to go to dinner?”

Another nod.  She had already spoken her last words, hours before.

“What would you like?  Sasa fries?”

Nod.  This one might have been a tiny bit more energetic.

So we and some of those who had assembled headed to Rebecca’s favorite restaurant in the world, owned by our friends, the place every one of our kids had come for their first meal outside of the house.  Rebecca had her favorite meal: a Japanese cream soda, some miso soup with extra tofu, and the Sasa fries.  She was able to carefully drink the soda from a sake cup by herself, and eat the fries, slowly, one at a time.  The soup required some assistance.

Back home that evening, we got birthday cupcakes ready.  It wasn’t her birthday until the next day, June 7th, but all day we had been doing birthday things — favorite breakfast, dinner at Sasa, cupcakes — because we were afraid she wouldn’t be there the next day, and we figured that if she was, we’d just do it all again.  Homemade cinnamon rolls every morning, Sasa and cupcakes every night, for however many days were left.

There were none.

I came into the living room to find Rebecca and Carolyn asleep, snuggled against each other on the sofa.  I kept silent and just watched them sleep, experiencing a bittersweetness beyond any I had imagined.

Then the cupcakes were brought in, and Rebecca woke up to see the lit candle in hers and to have us sing her “Happy Birthday”.  There was no expression on her face as she stared at the flame, no flicker of emotion.  She just stared as we blew out the flame for her, her face like a mask that hid our daughter.

But she ate the whole cupcake, and every bit of frosting, slowly and methodically scraping every last scrap off the plate and licking it from her fingers.  When it was done, I asked if she was ready for bed, and at her nod led her to the stairs.  She put a hand on the banister and walked up the stairs on her own, holding my hand without actually needing it.

I felt a small sliver of hope at that, until I realized that throughout all the frosting and stair-climbing, the teeth-brushing and changing for bed, being snuggled under the covers, her expression still never changed.  No joy, no excitement, no annoyance, no anger.  Nothing.

I was so incredibly proud of her, though.  She was so exhausted, and yet she insisted on doing as much as she could by herself.  The mask of her face may have hidden her emotions, but her fire was still as clear as ever.  I was humbled beyond measure.

Kat read Rebecca her favorite stories for the last time.

Tomorrow will be the first anniversary of her death, the day she would have turned seven years old.  I sit on the porch, and all my senses tell me that day has come again.  It is so incredibly alike, and yet so different, sitting here on the love seat in the cool June breeze without my Little Spark.

• Spring Air was published on Saturday, June 6th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Rebecca category.
• There have been thirteen replies.

One year ago today, it had been two days since Rebecca’s birthday party, held jointly with her best friend Ruthie, who not only shared her initials but was also four days older than her.  We had celebrated them both with a donut van and a balloon maker and the Rocket Car, which Rebecca rode at least four times.  It was completely over the top, but she was still with us, after ten months of treatments, even with the new tumor in her head, and that was worth celebrating.  Kat and I also decided to go all-out because we didn’t believe she’d ever have another birthday party.  A CT scan a few weeks before had indicated that the tumor had stopped growing, but each day she was getting more and more tired.

Except for her great big birthday party.  She was in better spirits than she had been for weeks, just for that day.  People commented on how much better she seemed, and when they confidently asserted that of course she would beat this, we smiled and didn’t say what we really thought.  Kat and I would occasionally share a glance, as people poured their optimism over us: Do they not understand what’s happening here?  Sharing our secret language of fear and pain, the way other couples share a secret language of love.

---

The day after the party, Rebecca was more tired than ever, barely speaking for hours at a time and increasingly distant.  So now we sat in a waiting room in the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, our study site, waiting with two of our best friends for the results from her latest MRI, wondering if we were being paranoid or prescient, not wanting to know.

The lead doctor came into the examination room alone, clutching a folder to his chest like it was a life vest, and we knew.  He started to speak, but we interrupted, asking if Rebecca could go play with the Child Life counselor, because we knew.  Of course she could, and she did, heading off with the counselor to the play room, leaving our side for the last time.

“I don’t have good news,” the doctor said, wincing a little, apology in his voice.

We knew.

I remember only a few fragments of what he said.  “Significantly larger” and “many flare sites”.  I remember thinking that they hadn’t even bothered to count them, there were so many.  Tumors coming, everywhere, all throughout her brain, the brain that was already being slowly squeezed by the enormous tumor we thought had been stopped.  All our dreams of extended time with her, of trying to find a way to roll back the runaway growth, shattered.

And then: “A few weeks at the most.”

We knew.

Our little girl, dying.  The end of hope.

“I’m so sorry, you guys.”

We knew.

---

As we drove away from the hospital, each of us sunken deep into our horror and despair, a torrential burst of rain hammered the roof of the van, overpowering the wipers even on high, all the while bathed in direct sunlight.  All the components for an incredible double or even triple rainbow — except the sun was too high in the sky.

Rebecca sat silent and still in the back seat, staring straight ahead, glowing in the rain-muted sunlight, never stirring even to ask where the rainbow was, let alone look around for it.

She had four days left to live.

• The Beginning of the End was published on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Cancer and Rebecca categories.
• There have been six replies.

It was the end-of-the-school-year picnic at the local elementary school, and we were invited.  Not because we have any students there right now, but because it was Rebecca’s school, and the PTA was set to dedicate a Little Free Library in honor of her and Trishka Tantanella-Holcomb, another student who died in 2014, a few months before Rebecca.

There were some words spoken, readings read, and then the Library unveiled.  I shook the hand of Trishka’s mother, expressing my condolences, and then I found myself locked in an embrace with Trishka’s father, taller than me, his breath hitching.

“I know,” I said.  “I know.”

He sobbed in my ear, quietly, despondently.  We stood back a step.

“Every day,” I said, looking into his eyes, my throat tight.

He shakily held up a finger.  “Not… not one day,” he ground out.

We turned to look at the new Library, adorned with the names of our little girls, hands on each other’s shoulders.  Kids and adults alike were putting in books they had brought to contribute, one after another.  Someone decided they’d had enough of the raucous pile of books, and started standing them on their ends, sorted by size.  I could imagine Rebecca saying, “Aw, boo!” in the casual, lighthearted way she liked to say it.  Expressing her disapproval, but without any heat to it.

A storm was moving in, so the crowd scattered back to their homes as a few of us quickly broke down the tables and sound equipment to move them inside.  The storm arrived just as we finished, filling the now-empty playground with curtains of rain, racing with the wind.  A minor lake immediately began to form as the playground’s storm drain was overwhelmed by the outpouring.  I thought about the video Kat had taken of Rebecca and her best friend Ruthie playing in another such lake, a little more than a year before, splashing and laughing as they poured water out of their rain boots.

As quickly as it had broken, the storm was over, the rain trailing off to a minor sprinkle.  I looked at the clouds to the west, realized what was about to happen, and fished my iPhone out of my pocket as I turned around.

“Get the kids outside,” I told Kat, who’d gone home with them ahead of the storm.  “There’s going to be a rainbow.”

I waited.  But not for long.  It slowly coalesced over the school, the first full-spectrum, full-arc rainbow I’d seen since a few months before Rebecca’s death.

She loved rainbows.

I wish so many things, all of them pointlessly, but one of the most piercing is that I wish I’d thought to make a rainbow for her while there was still time.  All it would have taken was a late afternoon and a garden hose, sprayed from the porch roof; all it would have taken was for me to break free of myself just long enough to think of it.  Just one more rainbow, just for her, just to see her eyes widen and her mouth arc upward in delight.

• Into Each Life was published on Sunday, May 31st, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Parenting and Rebecca categories.
• There have been four replies.

Yesterday was the eleven-month anniversary of Rebecca’s death.  I’ve been trying not to focus on those monthly anniversaries, but this one stuck out for me.  Because in a month — thirty days, as I write this — it will be both the first anniversary of her death, and the day she would have turned seven.

I haven’t really written directly about the grieving process since late March, because it’s been in a stable pattern and nothing has really changed.  Kat and I still grapple on occasion with the question of whether this is a nightmare or a post-dream.  Are we having a nightmare that our daughter died, and we’ll finally wake up; or did we dream that we had a middle daughter, and have since woken up?  Of course neither is true.  She came to us, and grew, and died.  It’s just so hard to come to peace or acceptance or even just comprehension that the mind hunts for an escape hatch, some way of making some part of it not true.

Don’t take this as intimation that we spend every waking second in agony, paralyzed by grief and shock.  Those periods of irreality and escape-seeking are just that: periods of time.  Not all the time.  Most of each day, I function normally, and honestly don’t think about what happened.  There’s work to do, projects to start or complete, errands to run, books to read, kids to raise.  These things all take precedence in their own ways, and Kat and I are both committed to being as present as possible in our lives.  We don’t deny what happened, but we don’t fetishize it, either.  Life cannot stop because a life stopped.  It’s not how either of us could live, even for ourselves, and we have more than ourselves to consider.

Some days are more difficult than others, of course, but for whom is that not true?  We all get through life one day at a time.

One of the things that has really helped us as a family, and Kat and me as parents, has been to go on family vacations.  Some went better than others. A short trip we took to Amish Country in late July of 2014 was probably too soon.  Our annual August trip to New Jersey, coming as it did on the first anniversary of Rebecca falling ill, was both helpful and difficult; and maybe the difficulty was part of what made it helpful.  The trip we took to Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge just after Christmas was just about right, in terms of timing, and was definitely a huge boost to us emotionally.

These escapes from the normal routine of home and calendar, where we could just concentrate on being together and doing things together and not having any particular demands on us, were incredibly helpful to the healing process.  Friends told us after our trips that we seemed more relaxed, less haunted.  The time we spent together helped us figure out how to be a new family, without all the distractions and chores of everyday life.

The other thing that Kat and I in particular appreciated about our trips is how we could make Carolyn and Joshua the center of the experience.  When Rebecca was being treated, and then when she was dying, we did what we could to make Carolyn and Joshua feel not marginalized, but there was no way to avoid it.  Mommy and Daddy went on a two-month trip to Philadelphia with Rebecca, not them.  We went with her to the hospital, not them.  We worried about her temperature and bruising level and energy, not theirs.  People made banners and posters and cards and healing stars for Rebecca, not them.  Friends and family came to see us because of Rebecca’s cancer, not because of them.  Make-A-Wish granted Rebecca’s wish, not theirs.  People came to pay respects to the memory of Rebecca’s life, not the ongoing reality of their lives.

How could they not feel marginalized?

Kat and I worried about this all the way through, guided to some degree by the insights I had from my own childhood, and tried to counter it as best we could.  Kat went on theater dates with Carolyn, and lunch dates with Joshua.  I played games they liked, and took them to parties.  Regardless, they knew what weighed most on our minds, and we never tried to deceive them or tell them they were wrong.

But those trips, after Rebecca was dead, could be all about them.  They were central again.  We went to the Jersey shore, and did old favorite activities as well as tried new things.  We went to Disney and granted their wishes as best we could, getting them to special character events and letting them stay up to watch the fireworks.  We took them to the museums and shops and ski slopes in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, picking the things they wanted to try out.  We made them feel special again.

You can’t imagine how great a gift that is, both for them and for us, unless you’ve been through this yourself.

That’s a gift that Kat and our good friend Karla want to give to families who are going through this.

That’s why, a week ago today, they launched Rebecca’s Gift, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to providing healing family vacations after the death of a child.  Rebecca’s Gift is accepting donations in support of that mission, and has its first fundraiser scheduled for this November.

Their goal is to raise enough money to send two or three families on healing trips in the summer of 2016; that is, summer of next year.  At first, the scope of Rebecca’s Gift will be narrow by necessity: eligible families will be those who had a child die of cancer between six and 24 months before the trip is taken, and who have surviving children age 18 or younger.  Rebecca’s Gift will work with partner organizations to identify families who need this support.  They don’t plan to take on anything more ambitious than that to start, in order to make sure those first trips are everything they can be.

As for the future, we’ll see.  The hope is that this will one day be open to more than a few families per year, open to families whose child died from something other than cancer, and perhaps open to parents who have no other children.  If Rebecca’s Gift grows strong enough to do those things, then I feel confident they will.  Those are all questions for the future.  For now, they’re focused on making sure they can help families who need the same time away to reconnect, rebuild, and relax.  Even if it’s just for a few days.

If you can help, I know your support will be welcome.

• Rebecca’s Gift was published on Friday, May 8th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the General and Personal categories.
• There have been three replies.

Over the weekend, I published “Time and Emotion” on The Pastry Box, in which I pondered the way we’re creating the data that the data-miners of the future will use to (literally) thoughtlessly construct emotional minefields — if we don’t work to turn away from that outcome.

The way I introduced the topic was by noting the calendar coincidence of the Star Wars-themed tradition of “May the Fourth be with you” and the anniversary of the Kent State shootings in 1970, and how I observe the latter while most of the internet celebrates the former: by tweeting some song lyrics with a relevant hashtag, #maythe4th.  I did as I said I would…and Twitter blindly added a layer of commentary with a very simple little content filter.  On twitter.com and in the official Twitter app, a little Stormtrooper helmet was inserted after the hashtag #maythe4th.

So let’s review: I tweeted in remembrance of a group of National Guardsmen firing into a crowd of college students, wounding nine and killing four.  After the date hashtag, there appeared a Stormtrooper icon.  To someone who came into it cold, that could easily read as a particularly tasteless joke-slash-attack, equating the Guardsmen with a Nazi paramilitary group by way of Star Wars reference.  While some might agree with that characterization, it was not my intent.  The meaning of what I wrote was altered by an unthinking algorithm.  It imposed on me a rhetorical position that I do not hold.

In a like vein, Thijs Reijgersberg pointed out that May 4th is Remembrance of the Dead Day in the Netherlands, an occasion to honor those who died in conflict since the outbreak of World War II.  He did so on Twitter, using the same hashtag I had, and again got a Stormtrooper helmet inserted into his tweet.  A Stormtrooper as part of a tweet about the Dutch remembrance of their war dead from World War II on.  That’s…troublesome.

Michael Wiik, following on our observations, took it all one step further by tweeting a number of historical events collected from Wikipedia.  I know several of my British chums would heartily agree with the 1979 tweet’s added layer of commentary, but there are others who might well feel enraged and disgusted.  That could include someone who tweets about the election in celebration, the way people sometimes do about their heroes.

But what about appending a Stormtrooper helment to an observance of the liberation of the Neuengamme concentration camp in 1945?  For that matter, suppose someone tweets May-4th birthday congratulations to a Holocaust survivor, or the child of a Holocaust survivor?  The descendant of a Holocaust victim?

You might think that this is all a bit much, because all you have to do is avoid using the hashtag, or Twitter altogether.  Those are solutions, but they’re not very useful solutions.  They require humans to alter their behavior to accommodate code, rather than expecting code to accommodate humans; and furthermore, they require that humans have foreknowledge.  I didn’t know the hashtag would get an emoji before I did it.  And, because it only shows up in some methods of accessing Twitter, there’s every chance I wouldn’t have known it was there, had I not used twitter.com to post.  Can you imagine if someone sent a tweet out, found themselves attacked for tweeting in poor taste, and couldn’t even see what was upsetting people?

And, as it happens, even #may4th wasn’t safe from being hashflagged, as Twitter calls it, though that was different: it got a yellow droid’s top dome (I assume BB-8) rather than a Stormtrooper helmet.  The droid doesn’t have nearly the same historical baggage (yet), but it still risks making a user look like they’re being mocking or silly in a situation where the opposite was intended.  If they tagged a remembrance of the 2007 destruction of Greensburg, Kansas with #may4th, for example.

For me, it was a deeply surreal way to make the one of the points I’d been talking about in my Pastry Box article.  We’re designing processes that alter people’s intended meaning by altering content and thus adding unwanted context, code that throws pieces of data together without awareness of meaning and intent, code that will synthesize emotional environments effectively at random.  Emergent patterns are happening entirely outside our control, and we’re not even thinking about the ways we thoughtlessly cede that control.  We’re like toddlers throwing tinted drinking glasses on the floor to see the pretty sparkles, not thinking about how the resulting beauty might slice someone’s foot open.

We don’t need to stop writing code.  We do need to start thinking.

• Warning Hashflags was published on Tuesday, May 5th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Culture, Observations, Politics, Tech, and Web categories.
• There have been eight replies.

This coming Monday, as has become tradition, a significant fraction of the Twitter user base will send out Star-Wars-themed tweets tagged #maythe4th or #maythefourthbewithyou, because saying the day in that way makes for a handy bit of wordplay.  There will be cosplay pictures, Yoda-esque inversions of sentence structure, and probably (this year) a fair bit of squeeing about the upcoming sequel and its brilliantly fan-service trailer.

Also this coming Monday, as has become tradition for me, I will send out a tweet containing the opening lines of “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, tagged #maythe4th, because it was on May 4th, 1970 that National Guardsmen fired a volley into a crowd of Kent State college students, wounding nine and killing four.

Anniversaries are potent psychological markers.  We reflect on historical events, both global and personal, that have particular meaning to us.  We celebrate the days of our birth, of first meeting our loved ones, of all manner of wonderful life-changing moments.  We mourn the days of our losses, of our betrayals, of all manner of terrible life-changing moments.  In every heart, a secret calendar.

There are only so many days in the year; pile enough things together on a calendar, and some of them will coincide.  Some of those alignments will coalesce into rays of remembered joy, warming us from the past.  Others will form spears of relived pain, lodging afresh in our hearts.  A few may do both, comforting and piercing all at once.

The longer we spend online, the more traces of those secret calendars will take public shape.  The dates of my first marriage and divorce are not, to the best of my recollection, recorded anywhere online, but the date of my second (and current) marriage is there, thanks to some early blog posts.  The date of my first professional award is there.  The dates of our children’s placements and adoptions are there.  The dates of my daughter’s illness and death are there.

The more we build online networks, not physical networks but social and emotional networks, the more pieces we leave lying around for algorithms to gather together and present to us with no real thought for what those pieces actually mean, or for how they should or shouldn’t fit together.  A human can glance through a pile of photos and tell which are emotionally or even narratively out of place.  Code cannot.  A human can quickly determine which scraps of text and pixels were happy at the moment of their creation, only to be transformed into talismans of sorrow by later events.  Code cannot.

We’re collectively creating strata of data, adorned with easy bits of metadata like time and date and sometimes place, but lacking all the truly important metadata like feeling and meaning.  As we share with each other, we share with the future.  We share with the companies that help us share with each other, because it’s easy to store it all.  Content in the old network was ephemeral, and in the older networks was tangible but private.  In the new networks, everything we create is easy to retrieve — if not for us, as users of the network, then at least for the code that runs on the same machines which accept all that we share.

And so, more and more with every passing day, code is written to reach back into everything we’ve created, assembling it along easily-identified axes like Likes or Faves or geographic coordinates or the day of the year, in order to show it to us again.  Sometimes it’s code we invite into our lives, but not always.  Sometimes we find the code that drives the networks we use resurrecting our past without warning.

This will not always be welcome.

There are things we can do to make our remorselessly remembering routines more humane, and most of those things are rooted in experience design.  We can design compassionate consent requests ahead of introducing new functionality, and easy ways to mark which dates and memories and bits of data should be avoided, and even design thoughtful expressions of remorse and apology.  We can and should add this very human layer of thoughtfulness to cushion us from literally unthinking code that yields results which may harm as easily as they may heal.

It won’t be easy, and we’ll make mistakes no matter how hard we try.  Our very attempts to be thoughtful may backfire and make things worse, but we’ll learn from those mistakes and do better the next time.

Nothing could be more human than that.

This article was originally published at The Pastry Box Project on 2 May 2015.

• Time and Emotion was published on Saturday, May 2nd, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Culture, Tech, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

A week ago today, I stood on a stage in San Francisco and told a couple thousand developers they were doing it wrong.  I mean, I got up there at O’Reilly’s Fluent, The Web Platfom conference, and gave a talk with a slide that literally said, “The Web is NOT a Platform”.  You can see it here, all fifteen minutes of it, in which I borrowed liberally from Jeremy Keith, added a splash of Mike Monteiro, and mixed it all together with things I’ve been saying and thinking for the past, oh, decade or more.

As it turned out, and a little bit to my surprise, a fair number of people completely agreed with what I had to say, judging by the reactions I got both online and in person.  Only a few people disagreed with me in person, which was fine; I actually hoped that there would be some pushback, since I’m not the smartest person in the world by any stretch.  The best part was, our disagreements were friendly, well-sourced, and collegial.  I love having conversations like that.  I don’t know that any of us changed our minds, but we were able to test our assumptions and viewpoints against each other.  In one case, I shook hands on a friendly, no-stakes bet over which of us would prove to be right, five or ten years down the line.

What made it really fun is that not twenty minutes after I stepped off the stage at the end of that talk, I stepped back on to accept a 2015 Web Platform Award alongside Sara Soueidan, Mark Nottingham, and Mikeal Rogers.  Those are some amazing people to stand with, and that it came from O’Reilly made it even more humbling.  In fact, Sara said it best: “This is my first time ever winning a web award, and I feel privileged to have won it from such a prestigious company.”  To which I would only add, and in such prestigious company.

I do want to note that what I said at the very end of my acceptance remarks was woefully insufficient.  What I should have said, and would have said if I hadn’t suddenly felt completely overwhelmed, is that the web has meant more to me, done more for me, and given more to me in the past two years than any one person could ever have any right to expect.  The web and what it makes possible, the ability to reach out and share and hear from you and stay in touch — that kept me sane, and may very well have kept me alive.

Thank you all.

• Heard and Received was published on Wednesday, April 29th, 2015.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Web categories.
• There have been two replies.