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If you are reading this obituary, it looks like I'm dead
- supportengineer 1y agoI feel bad for her family, they lost a wonderful person.
- schnebbau 1y agoPresumably that also means there's no one to bring the server back up.
- dsr_ 1y agoI know it feels like everyone is in tech, but, in fact, there's no evidence for that here: After I graduated, I had a brief stint as a Nursing Home Administrator until David Jr. was born, then stayed home and hatched a couple more pups over the next few years. In 2000, I formally joined the family real estate business and worked there until I was diagnosed… with ALS (I kept working through my long battle with cancer 12 years ago) … Yikes!! Cancer…THEN ALS. Ugh, Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up! I am very proud of the book I wrote about my journey through cancer. Check it out, it’s called “F Off Cancer” by Linda Brossi Murphy.
- matteason 1y agoMirror: https://archive.is/OpFMP https://archive.is/OpFMP
- mercwear 1y agoCool way to write up an obit, sounds like the world lost a good one.
- tapoxi 1y agoWith multiple references to Dunkin' and scratch tickets in lieu of flowers, I feel like I was reading this in her accent.
- deadbabe 1y agoHow did the obituary know the date of death? Did she have a surgery that she did not survive?
- jsbg 1y agoedit: the funeral home published this previous comment: could have been programmed as `Time.now - 1.day` to be published if no action was taken on the day of
- amelius 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch It is very tricky though. You probably want to have a bunch of fail-safes in place.
- smallpipe 1y agoYeah there's no way it's worth it for an obituary. You need it out in good time, so you can't have a delay longer than a few days. But it's definitely possible to be knocked out (or in a no-signal zone) for a few days and survive.
- amelius 1y agoThis being HN, let me say it could work as a service where the service (a human) would check if you are still alive after a timeout.
- suid 1y agoUh. yeah. Can you imagine her dragging herself up and reaching for a keyboard - "I'm ... not ... dead ... yet". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOW9QrLs0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOW9QrLs0o
- twosdai 1y agoI think this was a planned post she wrote while dealing with her disease, and likely a family member added in some relevant details and posted it. I've had a few terminally ill family friends that want to reclaim some control in death what life had taken from them, so they plan their funeral and some post death things out ahead of time.
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- travisgriggs 1y agoMy goal for the day, is to be a B+ husband. Liked that.
- gubbler 1y ago[flagged]
- mcdonje 1y agoNah, it shows he's chill and has good humor.
- kritr 1y agoEh, I think more optimistically, this is something her and her partner could joke about, and that he got a chuckle out of it. I’m sure more heartfelt words were shared outside the scope of this obit.
- reactordev 1y agoHe knew he was an A+ for letting her have more love at the end with the throuple. That’s class. That’s love. Bear with the swoosh for 1.5 years so your wife of 42 is happy. God he must be crushed right now.
- E39M5S62 1y agoEither I'm missing your joke, or you missed the joke in the post. The throuple was with a respirator, not another person.
- jexe 1y agoI read it as rolling with her own joke and lightening the load on the B+ rating (obviously also expressed as a loving ribbing given the context around it)
- reactordev 1y ago
- travisgriggs 1y agoAside: In an era of generative texts and humanity pushing the bounds of what to do with them, how does one verify the authenticity of something like this? Does it matter? ~1500 people (US) die of this per year.
- WolfeReader 1y agoMurphy seems like a neat person. I'll check out her book. I sense a bit of AI in this obit. Most tellingly, a suspicious emdash after Chipotle is a definite flag. The way the author describes post-death events in the past tense, non-hypothetically, indicates that someone other than Murphy had a hand in its authorship. (Would an author really write "Check it out, it’s called “F Off Cancer” by Linda Brossi Murphy"? That's not even the title of the book!)
- cactusplant7374 1y ago> (Would an author really write "Check it out, it’s called “F Off Cancer” by Linda Brossi Murphy"? That's not even the title of the book!) Perhaps there is some moderation happening on the blog.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mercwear 1y agoMaybe she liked to use AI.
- clms 1y ago[flagged]
- stingraycharles 1y agoThere are many people, myself included, who have been using em-dashes a lot since forever. I wouldn’t consider it a “definite flag”, the letter itself feels authentic.
- 1y ago
- gwd 1y agoSorry to be dense, but can someone explain why this is on the front page? Obvs sad for this person, seems like she had a fun time, but that's true of millions of people. Take this as "Help me see what I'm obviously not seeing", not a complaint.
- fartfeatures 1y agoI don't understand what it is doing here either.
- glenstein 1y agoA perfectly fair question, and predictably but unfortunately down voted. I think it's of interest because (1) it implicitly presents a question of how to go about a premeditated end-of-life message to be shared in an online space. And (2) relative to typical prose in this context, it's a bit cheeky, more like an "aw, shucks" than a grand tragedy. Something about it reached across the veil of impersonality, again in a digital space. And to me at least it's raising a question of how you choose to express yourself and how that choice gives you life in the ability to be regarded and known by others, and perhaps an even more general question of how we're all already doing something like that on a day to day basis. I don't think anyone who voted on it said any of that stuff out loud but you could feel those themes as implicitly present even if it's hard to put your finger on exactly what they are. To your point I don't think it's the only message that has questions like those behind it, but I don't think it's ever been teed up for community discussion quite like this.
- 293984j29384 1y agoAs someone with ALS and won't see next year, please do not post my memoriam page to HN.
- arm32 1y agoYou won't be able to stop me.
- dombama 1y agoHey friend, I just lost someone close to me from Parkinson's coincidentally the same exact day as the woman in the story and just a few miles from her. If you have any servers you want to keep running for a while or any EOL tech logistics your family won't understand I'd be happy to help. I can post your memoriam page wherever it belongs. My email is in my profile.
- joshcryer 1y agoALS is such a cruel disease. Cognitive recognition of a one way trip where all your functions shut down one by one. Highly recommend the book "I Remember Running" by Darcy Wakefield, which she wrote one finger tap at a time on her phone.
- FabHK 1y agoIndeed. Similarly, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, written by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, who had suffered a stroke with locked-in syndrome, by blinking his left eyelid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butter...
- firefoxd 1y agoI read a good chunk thinking this was a case of the telegram in The Master and Margarita: "Have just been run over by tram-car at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three pm come". She sounds like a wonderful person. Funny enough, I died in 2015. Well, I thought I was clever, I added a sort of obituary on my blog's RSS to publish only if I don't write for a whole year. In php I used strtotime(+1 year) , but for testing I tried +1 minute. I forgot to adjust and deployed. So in 2015, the top post on my RSS was that I was probably dead and someone should check on me.
- ge96 1y agoI've thought about this just so someone can let my cat out of my apt
- ASalazarMX 1y ago"Someone take my cat's corpse out since I've been dead for a year."
- ge96 1y agoWell... I have the automatic feeder/water so he's got time but I mean say you went to jail for 90 days, if no activity in a week or a month it would notify someone you know/emergency contact/your apt complex.
- aws_ls 1y agoI am a curious sort. Always look at bios. Came across yours, and reading your blog. Keep it going! :)
- skywardacoustic 1y agoI wonder if she helped them write it or if it was done by her alone before it progressed far enough that she couldn't anymore, or if they just did it for her with advice from her family?
- clms 1y agoShe wrote this. From her heart. I promise you.
- protonbob 1y ago> A celebration of life will be held at The Verve Hotel, 1360 Worcester St. Natick, on Monday, September 29, 2025 from 6:00 – 9:00 pm. Please join my family to celebrate my life, have a glass of wine…some tasty nibbles… and don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes and your favorite story to share about me and my shenanigans! This is a great location for out-of-town guests to stay in a hotel as well. I'm glad that this works for some people but in the west we have this extremely odd prejudice towards real grief. I'm convinced that it isn't healthy and not acknowledging that someone dying is extremely sad for them and their family doesn't allow for real healing.
- zoeysmithe 1y agoYep, this isn't great. Grieving people aren't in a "let's party" mood. It comes off as tone-deaf. This just stinks of "don't ever show real emotion" US 'tough guy-ism' as it sometimes translates via women. I remember being pressured to be either fun/funny or kind/nurturing. Actual real expression, expression of sadness, depression, etc was always something I was discouraged to do or even punished for. I remember feeling weird when I went to therapy. Like "Oh wait, I can just...talk about my real emotions?" I had a "jokey gal" persona for a long time, so maybe this hits closer to home for me, and it was a reflection of my social anxiety and unwillingness and lack of support in life to ever be vulnerable. So when I see the "jokester" persona, I always pause because it often comes from a bad place. I could even see myself doing this when I was younger. Today, I would never because the younger woman I was no longer exists and she would have done this out of fear and suffering and denial of self, not "fun." There's a certain immature, 'won't touch one's emotions' 'Michael Scott-ism' here that's off-putting. A sort of "Fun gal in the office" energy that betrays immaturity and even insecurity. The desire to be popular and have high-social capital extends even to death it seems. I lost a parent a while ago. I would not have appreciated a "jokey" display at all. It was the saddest day of my life and even today I still mourn. I'll never get over it. And a sort of productivity culture-esque, "haha we had our fun, now go back to work/school," or whatever. In reality, a lot of people need time to grieve. I wish I took off more work than the 1 day bereavement I got from work and the 1 pto day I had. I was a high-key mess for at least a couple weeks, and a low-key mess for months. I would find myself crying randomly. I would have these sudden intrusive thoughts like "What does it matter, we just die in the end." It took a while to get where I am today where I have optimism about life and where I see my parent as gone forever, and without feeling pain about it. As for cultures that have celebratory funerals, well, this isn't one of those cultures, so its not normal to expect people to conform to that. And even in those cultures there's a different more somber ceremony attached to the celebration. That being said, maybe this was her coping mechanism, and it got her this far. Great. That worked for her. But for the grieving people, maybe "jokey gal" persona isn't the best. shrug, its not a big deal, but this being posted here as some kind of amazing and exceptional thing isn't great either. This has problems worth mentioning. I think we all think we can just 'fix things' or 'cheat the suffering of death' by being creative or different, but the human brain remains as-is. It wants to grieve and often there's no getting out of that. Loss is painful and can't just be turned into fun by will alone. I think in most cultures this would be off-putting if not offensive. On the other hand, we have to respect how people wanted to be remembered. That being said, the stages of grief book helped me. It validated my pain and showed me a path. I hope her friends and family find what works for them. Maybe "Michael Scott-isms" worked for her, that's fine, but it definitely is not going to work for everyone. So just a reminder, there are many ways to grief, and some will do it via comedy, but its also okay to go down a traditional route or even get into therapy over it. Its also okay to cry today and laugh tomorrow and vice-versa. Sometimes I think of my parent and just chuckle at a memory. Life can be complex this way. She seemed fun and nice. I hope the above isn't too critical, but its more for us still living. I hope she is now resting in peace. Or, as I am a Buddhist, that her karma was found a fortunate rebirth.
- koliber 1y agoI loved every word of this post. But do keep in mind that flowers do make many people as happy as scratch off tickets.
- MitonBraga 1y ago[dead]
- jbrr 1y agoI lost my wife earlier this year. She died unexpectedly in her sleep. I wish so badly I had something like this from her. Knowing that she considered her life well lived would mean the world to me. But of course that’s not possible, or highly unlikely, when someone dies suddenly. I guess that’s the trade off for not having to see her slowly waste away from a degenerative disease, for not having all my recent memories of her set in a hospital. But fuck, I wish I had that. This was so nice to read, and must be a great comfort to her family in the midst of devastation.