From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind:
- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.
- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.
- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.
- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.
I agree with all of what you say, and while I thought the author was very good, I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. For the same reason that no one can ever know what's inside another person's mind, much less a child understand their parents.
> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
In the process of grieving, when the emotions are at their rawest, it is difficult to not have knee-jerk reactions to the emotions that are piling-up fast and strong.
Except for that very slip, I actually found the piece impressively objective, level-headed, compassionate and open-minded.
I'd have to agree with you here. I often tell people that while we have control over our actions, we don't really have control over our emotions in the same sense. Feeling anger, happiness, sadness, bitterness, resentment, or anything else is something that will happen regardless of whether we want to or not, and all we can do is learn how to process our emotions to be able to learn how to react in ways that will hopefully hurt others less. I can't even begin to imagine the magnitude of emotions that the author has dealt with both the initial loss and the flurry of findings after the fact, so their reactions in both of the posts were quite mild all things considered. I'm lucky enough not to have lost either of my parents yet, and even with the hope that I don't find out anything anywhere close to as drastic as these revelations when I inevitably do, I still don't have any trouble imagining acting far more vain and bitter based just on the sadness I feel without needing to add any of the other bombshells into the mix.
Having taken some flak here for my reaction to that line, I'd clarify that I don't blame the writer for feeling that way. That's perfectly natural. My critique is that the injection of a summary opinion cheapened the writing and flattened the complexity. In a literary sense, the author was doing a great job of showing, rather telling the reader what to think, up to that point. The reader may very well have drawn the conclusion that the father was a coward. In a legal sense, the flash of bitterness actually harms their case. It draws into question their reliability as a witness. Calling it a "slip" was insightful, as it implies both.
I think she absolutely has a right to her judgment. She clearly has empathy for her father, but the rest of her family also suffered--greatly, it seems--from how he went about his life.
She wrote most of it centered on his perspective (as she understands it). And if you take that line as such, then you're right. I took that line as bringing another perspective to show the damage he caused. She has a lot to unpack and showing those conflicts demonstrated it.
> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.
I think given that the writer, who lived in the same culture with the same dangers and expectations, decided to accept the risks by coming out, I don't think it's vanity. They did what their father was too afraid to do.
It is absolutely bitterness, but I don't think you're in any position to judge the appropriate level of bitterness for a child to have towards their deadbeat parent.
He was so afraid of coming out that he FORCED his wife to never divorce him and kept a lover on the side while cheating on him as well with multiple partners at the heights of the AIDS epidemic while lying to him that they had a future that he was too scared to ever make a reality. If that's not a coward, then I don't think you and I can agree on very simple definitions of words like "coward".
For those reasons, I won't even look for such letters when my parents die. I will take a photo or two. There are of course reasons to dig in the past, but that should be done cautiously, not for sensation, and even then under the condition that we only know a little and may not understand. The past is past. Nothing you learn can change it, but it can seriously fuck up your future.
> One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance"
Here's a funny thing, what I got from that story was that it must have been a hard and sad life for the dad, probably the mom, and especially a horrifying discovery for the mom. These are not judgments, but tidbits of empathy and sadness for all the parties involved. I didn't have to force myself into that, probably because it didn't clash with my personality or values.
If something made you tick and you want to condemn one of the people in the story, I'm wondering if forcing your brain into "accepting" would make any difference. The real question is what you feel for the other person. I think it might come out as a judgment if it clashes with your actual values and personality. If you don't recognize yourself and would have had a different approach, you might have a negative outlook on the people in the story.
I'm extremely lucky to be a straight dude in the progressive society of today's. Had I been a gay guy in the traditional Chinese culture of the 80s, I'd probably have had the same life as that dad, and employ some of the same strategies. So it's easy for me not to judge. But some people are more upfront, active, liberated, and for them it might be harder not to judge ; and I think that's fine.
Your comment about not judging their integrity because they had different life experiences... that doesnt make sense to me. Integrity is absolute, you dont get slack on your integrity because you were dealt a bad hand.
That being said, we ought not to judge anyway
> I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
Absolutely. A person's right to privacy doesn't die with them.
If it were written to seek attention in 2025, it would be on substack or twitter, not on a quiet personal website that can't go viral unless someone else posts it on hackernews
She has a right to seek attention? And you are right. The truth untold and the moments that never were cannot be recounted. They can be grieved and part of grief is anger.
I re-learned by my tears when reading this that the only thing that counts in life is love and connection. Connections not made are missed opportunities.
I lost a parent in my early twenties. Alas, anger was a very large part of my emotional arsenal then. Writer could have had a role model in her father. If only the truth would have been there between father and daughter. Layers upon layers of difficult interactions. Thinking about your parents death and the period of time they made you, cared for you, formed you, hindered you, burdened you with emotional baggage, is different with each passing of a few springs.
so what if it is? incels are obviously suffering too; it's not like the fact that they presently hold a toxic and sexist opinion makes them into a moral non-entity. Instead they're just tragic. Doesn't mean you can, or should, help them, nor should you tolerate that attitude when it is threatening to others. But it's tragedy all the same.
Why link closeted gay men with Incels? There was no shade of “deserve” or “victim” in the parent comment. Fact is gay men historically have had a very bad time finding love, Incels is a weird subgroup of hateful men with negative viewpoints, unless I’m out of touch with their zeitgeist.
I just think the comparison comes off as unkind to gay men.
People seem to disagree with this comment but it makes sense. Lots of people get no genuine sexually or emotional attention sure to severe disabilities, cultural incompatibility, weight issues, or simply because they don't know how to socialize properly. It's odd to say they can't live a full life, just because they didn't kiss a girl in the 9th grade.
If relationships are so key to the human experience, the incels would be right. They argue society should feel bad for them and accommodate them, because not being able to get sexual attention keeps them from having a normal life.
Not that I agree with them, but it seems odd to place so much value on relationships, except when people complain it's a problem they can't get one. I have a severely disabled friend who talks about wanting to get married every day. No one has ever shown him that kind of affection and I don't think anyone ever will. That's life for some people unfortunately. If you keep telling them they're missing out on the most important part of life of course it just makes them more frustrated
Just because something is key to the human experience, doesn’t mean some other person personally owes sacrificing their literal bodily autonomy to accommodate another who is missing out. We don’t have to pretend most people can live a happy life as a sexless hermit (we just had a large natural experiment on this during COVID) to avoid demanding anybody has to date someone they don’t want to.
That's individuals deciding not to be with other individuals. It's not two people of the same sex who want to be with each other but are arbitrarily prohibited by the rest of society.
Most people do deserve to be able to form emotional and sexual connections, and most people that are unable to in practice are not incels and deserve sympathy without complication. They’re victims, but only in the same sense that someone can be the victim of a hurricane. The important bit is that no person has a duty to be the one to provide those connections.
> They’re victims, but only in the same sense that someone can be the victim of a hurricane.
What about those that can't form connections because of emotional abuse in their past? I wouldn't call them victims of a hurricane like it's some kind of unpreventable natural disaster. They're victims of their abusers and the people in their life that didn't intervene to stop the abuse.
That’s absolutely true - I was mostly trying to stake out a weaker claim against someone who seemed to think anyone who feels bad about the fact they can’t find sex is an unsympathetic incel. And I don’t think even the people who are lonely simply due to vague social trends like fewer tight-knit communities have an unpreventable problem at the societal level. It’s just there’s not an obvious perpetrator (pet theories about the causes of social decay non-withstanding).
Not at all- human connection and love are important and hard for most people to live without. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. The problem with incels is they feel entitled to that, and use it as a basis to fuel hate towards others for denying them what they feel entitled to- and there is no sense of that sentiment in the comment you replied to.
Yes, there are some toxic people here, as in any community or population, but there are also thoughtful and compassionate people here. This article seems to be mostly filled with the latter. I don’t know what your experience on HN has been but I encourage you to look beyond the that unpleasent post and consider the humane majority on this pot before you make your decision.
- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.
- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.
- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.
- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.