Tag: grief

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My (since recently former) colleague I. gave us a deeply thoughtful and touching gift during our team’s Christmas dinner last week, as her personal goodbye to us.

She gave us a broken vase.

We talk amongst our team about picking ourselves up after the loss of Frank and all that entailed this year and last in terms of collecting the shards and building ourselves a new vase from them.
My personal sense of beauty resides in the layering of all our human emotions, the scars we carry that make joy and happiness more noticeable and richer. I’ve remarked on that before.
Colleague I. said she feels that’s true not only on a personal level, but for groups too. The shared experience has its own intensity of meaning, a separate layer in what beauty is made out of.

She gave us a broken vase.
One she put together again, Kintsugi style, not trying to erase the damage, but making it a key part of the identity and beauty of the renewed object.

And she filled it with multiple layers of encouraging messages and compliments from people, organisations, clients around us expressing what we as a team mean to them. Messages from our company’s extended family members, she said. For the moments in which we feel broken, so that we can pick a message at random and can be encouraged, comforted.

Such an awesome gift. Beautiful. Thank you I.

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A fun, beautiful and moving novel that I enjoyed mostly in one sitting.
Starting in the nineties, that time when computers and digitisation were common enough to be open to many smart newcomers but still rare enough and simple enough to quickly get a grasp of the field, it stretches to present day. This allows a reflection from our current cultural perspectives.
Myself I was a few years earlier than this book is set (the book is set in second half of the nineties, with me gaining internet access in 1989 at university, and playing the games that got released in the first half of the nineties), but enough overlap. The protagonists are gamers and game builders. The fictional games described are believable enough to feel you may have seen them at the time or wish to play them. Gaming, early internet era, depression, grief, the topics are very relatable to me and carry enough echoes for me from that same era to strongly resonate with.
Recommended.