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Showing posts from 2018

Finding Davey: A Father's Search for His Son in the Afterlife

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Note: On August 17, 2018 I released my book: Finding Davey: A Father's Search for His Son in the Afterlife . It is available on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle formats . When I started writing Finding Davey it wasn't because I wanted to write a book. It was because I wanted to keep a journal of what was happening to me as I navigated my way out of the profound grief I found myself in. Initially it was a struggle just to get through each day; so much of my life had been turned upside down by the death of my son that I found myself in free-fall, grasping for anything stable. Most days I would write down how I felt and record my thoughts. This was not intended to be a cathartic exercise; the writing was often very difficult and required that I re-experience the emotions as I wrote down how I had been feeling. Many tears were shed on my keyboard in the early stages. I did it because I wanted to see if I was in fact getting better. When you've fallen down a hole so

Digital Landmines

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When you lose a child the number of challenges you face is profound. One of the reasons many grief stricken people disconnect from their prior lives is that the reminders of their loss are everywhere. I experienced this first hand after I lost my son in a car accident in July of 2016. As a purveyor and advocate of technology for over 30 years, I had always been a fan of the sharing nature of the modern internet. Easy access to information opened completely new and innovative ways of solving problems for me, and I embraced it fully. Over the last few years social media has evolved, pushing more and more automated engagement on it's users. Social media is both a blessing and a curse to the newly bereaved; it can be a primary conduit for connecting with friends and family. In our case it allowed us to see all the wonderful acts of kindness people were doing in our son’s name , receive links for inspirational videos and articles, and do research on how consciousness could survive p

What to say to a parent that lost a child

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Losing a child is arguably the most difficult challenge a person can face in life. When I lost my son Davey in July of 2016 I was plunged into the most profound grief and sadness I had ever experienced. In my 55 years on this planet I have been through a lot, however this made every other challenge I encountered seem trivial by comparison. It wasn't just my son that died in a car accident on that hot muggy day in July. I died too. I instantly became a completely different person, changed to my core by an event that brought up all of those deep existential questions that I had previously just brushed aside. In the initial days I was in free-fall and found myself surrounded by hundreds of people that wanted to express their sympathies, doing everything they could to support me and my family. The vast majority of my friends and family handled it with grace and compassion. A few were so overcome with emotion they blurted out things that only made my sadness more profound but as t

A Course Change

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When I started this blog just over 10 years ago it was to  document what I was experiencing while adopting a Mac . My primary computing platform at that time was Windows and I was both a long time user and developer. My goal with the blog was simple: I was learning a new platform and wanted to share with others what I had discovered. The internet has always been a tremendous resource for me and I felt that I should do my part and contribute to that knowledge base. That simple goal ended up serving hundreds of thousands of readers over the years. Though I haven't made a single post to this blog in over 4 years, hundreds of people still visit this blog daily based on search results for things like  Time Machine errors ,  keyboard shortcuts ,  upgrading an old Mac hard drive to an SSD  and  setting up a MacBook for a college student . I received messages from readers of this blog fairly regularly asking when I would return to blogging, but I always replied with "soon... I h