Ask Lemmy

Watch Grave of the Fireflies. I feel that's pretty high on the totem pole of pain.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/grave_of_the_fireflies

Obviously, everything is relative and trauma comes in many varieties. Nothing should be taken for granted and everyone’s experience is valuable.

That said, this seems pretty fucked up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case

Outliving your own child.

I would think that loss of a child. As a teenager, I had a neighbor whose friend had lost both a child and a spouse and who said that the spouse was more difficult. Of course this is subjective and will depend on each person.

Losing your wife and child during childbirth

Trump has been my biggest one, entirely seriously. My partner and I uprooted our lives and left our home fleeing the country. We were forced to say goodbye to our friends, our family, and a huge loving artist community. We had just found a fantastic apartment around the corner from our friend, and my career as an artist was really starting to blow up but now it's on pause because of visa restrictions. I have never cried so much in my life. I used to never cry.

The trauma runs so deep that I frequently hallucinate seeing my friends while I'm out and about, it absolutely kills me every time. I remember telling my partner "we will remember these as the good ole days" the day before the election.

I'm a trans latina immigrant

alzheimers or losing one to it.

In a way it's a bad thing to have a competition who has the worst. We all suffer one way or the other, and we should lift each other up.

Anyway, here are my top entries:

• abuse by one's parents
• loss of a loved one
• refusal to get help

My wife was rushed by ambulance to the area hospital with post-partum complication at about 48 hours.

Then seven days latter our new born was rushed off to the same hospital with suspected meningitis - she spent nearly 2 week there starting in NICU.

Both wife and daughter survived, although both were pretty hard to go through at the time.

If either of them ended for the worse it would have been crushing - if both of these had ended badly I suspect it would be fairly well up there

Seeing your whole family wiped out at once.

See: Gaza

The greatest tragedy a person could experience is the one they do experience.

Discovering the person you have been in a relationship with simply isn't who you thought they were, and how they led you to believe was something you deserved.

Hard to imagine anything worse than losing your child.

Probably everyone you ever loved dying painfully while you yourself survive but severely crippled.

It sounds flippant and stupid, but like... What could be worse???

I knew a family where the son brutally killed his mother, and I think the father (and the mother obviously, but that was shorter) probably went through just about the worst personal tragedy dealing with that.

I could not tell the greatest (as far as I'm concerned, I would say it would be loosing my spouse but that's also completely subjective and personal: she is at least as amazing as a human being today as when we first met almost 30 years ago). But I can easily tell you what I think is the most dramatic tragedy, or the one having the most dramatic consequences for oneself as well as for the entire society around them.

It is to not read books. To never feed one's brains with new and/or opposing thoughts. To waste one's live trapped in a tiny bubble of certainties.

Being born with no direction in life. My whole entire life feels completely aimless and it has always just been making it off of audibles and improvisations. I have absolutely no clue what I even intend to do within the next 5 years.

If you've been born into a family whose only knowledge is struggle and no plans or ambitions, they would get this.

I wouldn't say "the worst", but being abused by your own birthparents are probably in the top 10. Literally breaks your brain. Much depression.

I think that you can make most tragedies worse in a fairly-mechanical fashion. Whatever it is, it's probably worse if you're being stung by bees at the same time, for example. So trying to come up with the very worst tragedy seems like it'd be pretty hard. You could list some bad tragedies...

Honestly, there are many examples of tragedies that are quite large scale and intense like what the indigenous of the americas have experienced, or what many Palestinians are currrently experiencing. Another that comes to mind is the colonization of Haiti, and what they have gone through. The greatest widespread purveyor of tragedies is the industriously exploitative evolution of capitalism/colonialism IMO.

Being enslaved probably?

I think Anterograde amnesia Is pretty high on the list.

Refusing to vaccinate your children and losing one to measles in 2025

https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-died-stand-decision-not-vaccinate/16065046/

Death of a loved one by unnatural causes.

Being born.

That heavily depends on the person.

Believing one's tragedy is the greatest

A whole feast of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated martian meat, and little baby birdy feet... But you don't have a spoon. 😔