Thursday Thoughts: Coding and Grief

One of the things that started my career change into coding one year ago yesterday was the death of my mother. I’m very open about why I decided to pursue coding. I had always loved coding but never thought I was enough. My mother had always wanted the best for me and tried to inspire me to do more. I was smart but I’m a nerodivergent person so traditional academics was rough for me.

My mother was born and raised Hawaiian and Japanese. She was in elementary school when Hawai’i was “officially a state”. Growing up, white educators told her (and others) they were dumb Hawaiians that could only go as far as a career school. Well she was conflicted but she went to college, became a PE teacher. But it wasn’t what she wanted so she went to the Army, was a nurse there, then came out of it and went to medical school where she became a doctor and worked in the career she loved till the day she died.

It wasn’t until after her passing that I took that to heart. To keep from letting grief consume me when a central part of my world was taken from me suddenly and traumatically, I went the bootcamp route with Flatiron. Through the coding, I saw little things in code and its uses in software development that my mom would have loved. Her memory, her spirit was my rubber ducky.

It was through this and coding that I was able to better move on. To not be consumed by grief at the loss of family and job and being thrown into an uncertain time. I even coded a memorial application for my Javascript project. In a way, coding helped me keep her alive in my memories and in my heart and heal through keeping busy and seeing how code affected my mothers life which is funny because when it came to the computers and the transition from paper to digital in the medical field, my mother was a grumpy Boomer about it.

Most times coding is a job. It’s a technological life force for our age of computers and smartphones, streaming services and games. But from my experience and others I’ve seen, its healing in a way. For me it helped me through my grief and mourning, for others, a step to a better life and future. In this time of innumerable losses, sometimes just coding a memorial project, even if just for yourself to process is the most cathartic thing for us software engineers.