Goodbye, Dad
My father passed away yesterday. I’m still very numb about the whole thing, still processing, but I didn’t want this moment to go by without some writing. Going through old articles from a previous version of this blog, I found something I wrote about my dad on the occasion of his retirement from performing surgeries in 2008. I’m reposting it here for posterity. Rest in peace, Dad,
It’s Who You Are
[Originally published on May 6th, 2008]
Last Friday, my dad performed the last surgery of a career that has spanned over thirty years. By my conservative guess, based on a minimum of two scheduled surgeries per week plus countless emergency room calls, his total career count would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 operations. For the obvious reason that I have no place in an operating room, I never saw his work first hand, but I have looked over his shoulder at the never-ending x-rays of anonymous reconstructed knees, hips and hands. To me, they were bones and screws, plates and stitches. To him, they were his craft, his passion, his profound responsibility.
It is hard to understand, as a software engineer, what it means to be a surgeon. Most of the engineers I know weren’t required to pour their souls into their studies in order to make it. We may have pulled the odd all-nighter, but none of us had to endure multi-year residencies with 72-hour work shifts. We rarely (if ever) have to make life-and-death decisions, much less in a split-second.
So demanding is the training to become a surgeon that for those who achieve it, being a surgeon is truly who they are. Not too many software engineers are software engineers the way that surgeons are surgeons. This makes it all the more difficult to say that it is time to stop, because what are you if you are not toiling under the responsibility that your patients have entrusted you with? What are you if you are not working with the scalpel and the volumes of experience that you have amassed?
I believe that when you retire from surgical practice, you are yet a surgeon. My dad was born a surgeon and some day he will die a surgeon. He is and has been many other things–a dad to me and my sister first and foremost–but the fire that burns in his eyes was lit for the day when he earned the right and the awesome responsibilities of surgical practice and it will never be extinguished. For the rest of his life, memories of the sleepless nights and hardest cases will stay with him along with the faces of the thousands of people who put their trust in him and were better for it.
Today, on his birthday, his office staff gave him a huge, handmade quilt; each panel depicted a milestone from his entire medical career. A week from Friday, my dad is being honored as Surgeon of the Year by the Connecticut Orthopedic Society. After all of that, he’ll be back at his office practice and continuing his work as an independent medical examiner. Some day I imagine my dad might even decide to retire completely, but a part of his mind and his heart never will.
In my heart of hearts, one my dad’s grandchildren (Linnea, Solomon, or any of the ones to follow) will discover that like their grandpa, they were born a surgeon. I certainly won’t know what to do with them, but my dad will. He’ll give them a piece of that fire to carry on through the long, hard hours, the many years of school, and the most difficult split-second decisions.
And if all of this was no indication–I am incredibly proud to have a dad who has accomplished so much and who has helped so many people.
Supporting Grief
A few weeks back, one of my coworkers (we’ll call him Adam) had a major health scare and was hospitalized for a while. Another of my coworkers (we’ll call her Betty) pulled together notes of well-wishing from our team and prepared them in a really thoughtful way, adding “get well soon” messages and images to the document before sending it along. Adam is out of the hospital now, which is a huge relief for everyone.
This week, in a completely unrelated incident, Betty’s father passed away after a heart attack. This time around, the task of collecting people’s messages of support has fallen to me. And wow, am I bad at this. At Adam’s suggestion, I am following the same playbook that Betty used. But it feels highly ironic to be using this format for her, when just weeks ago she was doing this for someone else.
More generally, this has me thinking about how to offer sympathies in a genuine way. Sharing people’s joy is easy. Acknowledging people’s pain seems harder - not just because the occasions are sad, but because grief manifests in so many unpredictable ways. What kind of support does someone want during this time?
I think a number of the folks who’ve left messages of support for Betty have it right. Their wishes for her and her family revolve around the notion of having the space to feel. Simply being able to sit with the feelings of grief and loss and not put them aside. I personally get a little uncomfortable with “thoughts and prayers”, but wishing people space to feel seems like a meaningful and universal gesture.
There are people close to me who are in ill health, and I genuinely hope none of my coworkers has to put notes of sympathy together for me and my family any time soon. But the takeaway for me here is pretty clear: pushing through a big loss is not the healthy option. If you are grieving, or suffering any other difficult occasion, seek out the space to feel. It will hurt, but shoving it aside for later can only make things worse.
N7 Day
Projects
Coding Projects
I’m nhr on GitHub. Here are some of my more interesting projects:
Shiftzilla
While I was part of the OpenShift team, I was responsible for managing several consecutive product releases. Understanding our progress against bug counts was critical to staying on top of our quarterly release cadence. I wrote Shiftzilla to start capturing Bugzilla-based info and offering us a way to analyze long-time trends on a per-release and per-development-team basis.
AsciiBinder
Another problem we had to solve for OpenShift was managing documentation for several different versions of the product at once. The fantastic AsciiDoctor tool could handle converting markdown pages (specifically, AsciiDoc pages) to HTML, but there was no utility at the time that could compile a bunch of AsciiDoctor-generated pages into a single website. I created AsciiBinder to solve that problem.
The SWN Sector Generator
Totally not work-related, but very relevant to one of my hobbies. I took the open-sourced rules for a role playing game called Stars Without Number and created this galaxy generator that has been running almost continuously since 2010.
Non-Coding Projects
Totally Normal Dance Mix
My DJ persona is DJ Harrison Ripps. Starting in April of 2020 I started live streaming a DJ set every Friday night. This was the birth of a listening party / Zoom hangout that has come to be known as the Quarantine Dance Mix. We all thought the pandemic would be behind us after a few months, and I thought the same thing about my DJ sets. I went weekly for a full calendar year! Now that things have opened up a bit, I’m livestreaming on the first Friday of every month.
Blogging and Creative Writing
My on-again-off-again hobby for many years. In an alternate universe I’m a professional writer. Some day I may be one here, too. In the meantime, there’s this blog.
About Me
I’m a career technologist, writer, and hobbyist dj with about a dozen other hobbies as well.
The Ides of March
Fast Food
Fedora 31 on the Razer Stealth GTX (Late 2019)
2019: Year of the Spartan
TGIF
That App You Love – Headed to DevConf.cz!
A Sunbeam for Mia
We lost Mia today. I’ve always read posts like this with some amount of indifference because in the back of my head I am thinking “this is just an animal” and “this is not a person”. And so I forgive you for feeling the same way. I understand that response.
This stream of thoughts is really for me, and it is also for my wife and kids and anyone else who feels the loss of our “just a cat” as acutely as I am feeling it right now. But maybe you’ve been here, too, with your pets, at the end of a chapter in your own life. Here is a rememberance for us.
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