As one of the people who might be an intermediate case for posting in Witness Me (my mother isn't dead, and hopefully won't be for some time, but the thing that makes stage IV cancer so frightening is the proximity it has to death), I'm mostly wondering why this conversation is happening now. Was there a problem with how that board was being used before?
I would just like a more descriptive description. The memey one is fun, but tells me nothing about what the forum does, and 'WITNESS ME' is similarly super obtuse when 'witnessed' is such an ubiquitous statement here as to be a standard reaction. The only reason I knew it was about death at all was the context clues. Someone who didn't look in the forum often might not ever get those context clues.
I mean correct me if I'm wrong but I think late stage cancer would fall comfortably within most definitions of WITNESS ME best practices. Spoiler: cancer, death One of my friends lost her mom to leukemia. There was hope right up until the very end. I think it wasn't until the last few weeks that they had a pretty solid certainty that she wasn't going make it much longer, and there was still one last hail mary option after that. At the funeral my friend told me she thought she wasn't feeling sad right then because she'd already had so much time to grieve. Because she had started grieving well before she could have known how it would go. The grieving process doesn't wait until you know for sure. It won't let you opt out if you don't have a compelling enough timetable. I think it would be amazingly unkind to refuse to acknowledge mourning of death until all hope is sufficiently extinguished. Long term illness doesn't necessarily work that way. (As for why it's being discussed right now, it might have something to do with the fact that I made a post asking about it the other day, then reported the post so the mod team would see it. I don't know about any mod discussions before, during, or after. But that might have been a factor in timing.)
My idea of the thing had been death and dying, which includes end of life things. Bereavement is a fine way of putting it probably, but the pre-death dying process is murky with the term bereavement and why I was attached to Death and Dying specifically as the central focus.
I think we've got at least three or four different models of the thing. There's death/dying (includes celebrity deaths, etc.) There's bereavement (includes non-deathy losses such as divorce). There's "dead loved ones" (includes neither people you didn't personally know, nor non-deathy losses.) There's "general sad of some kind". It seems to me that "death/dying" and "bereavement" are both valid categories, and they're not the same category, but they have a lot of overlap. Possible solution: Both?
I don't see the problem with the system as it stands. If it needs a subforum for death to make it more respectable and separate to some people, though, then so be it. Forgive me if I'm wrong because I've only browsed through this thread with haste before going to an appointment, but regardless of how many categories and groupings there are it looks like the only thing anyone is regularly calling for here is holding reverence for/separating/whatevering death from the rest of the things people might require comfort for. At risk of sounding like an asshole, I feel like making a subforum is a simple and easy solution. The longer this drags on, the more people are going to feel hurt and like their particular brand of sadness is questionable.
If we set a subforum aside only for death and end-of-life because some people might feel disrespected by having their losses equated to other people's non-death losses, how long before people start arguing about whether it's acceptable to post about your beloved dead/dying animal in a thread where other people are posting about beloved dead/dying humans, or whether it's appropriate to mourn someone you didn't know IRL as much as you mourn a family member? Once people start judging some people's losses as less worthy of grieving than other people's losses, it doesn't go anywhere good. (Being a transhumanist I'm not going to touch the subject of reverence for death, but I think people should respect other people's grief whether or not they "agree with" it.)
Added description to the forum, made a thread tag for Death. Rationale for thread tag vs. subforum: With a subforum, you will always have people unsure whether a thing is [something] enough for the more-restrictive category, or too [something] for the other category. This way, it's up to you, and I don't think we're likely to try to police tag usage, but it's there if you want to indicate the thing somehow.
