Something Ends, Something Begins

Welcome to Oren's Nerdy Letter #17!

This week I lost my Aunt to lung cancer and COPD.

Over the last year, she had been struggling with breathing and surviving in general. She was dependent on oxygen and CPAP to breathe. On Yom Kippur eve, she exhaled for the last time in the hospital, surrounded by her close family.

Her death broke me. Other people in our family died before, but nobody this close to me since my grandmother passed nine years ago. I miss her so much.

So, to honor her, I want to tell you a bit about her and how much she meant to me. Later, we will talk about the beginning I alluded to in the title, I promise.

Farewell, Aunt Ilana

My first memories of Aunt Ilana are all set in her old home - a house I spent my childhood in. Her home stood next to the elementary school her daughter and I attended. So, naturally, I spent a lot of time there after school and in the summertime.

Aunt Ilana made amazing schnitzel. It was so thin, salty, and you just didn't want it to end. She served it with her famous spaghetti.

In the last seven years, Aunt Ilana was also our neighbor so I saw her weekly. We would give her food for the weekend. Especially in the last year when she struggled with cancer. In a matter of months, we saw her transform from the once confident, head-held-high woman she was into someone so frail she couldn't stand on her own and had to use a wheelchair. My brothers and cousins all cried at one point or another. We all loved her.

About a month ago, she was hospitalized for the same breathing problems that ultimately took her life. She survived it that time. I wrote about this in issue #12. She asked each of us to promise her something. That promise is always on my mind now that she's gone.

Farewell, Aunt Ilana. I love you so much, and will never forget you and what I promised you.

When I learned she had passed, I wrote a post on Facebook that came from the heart. It wasn't outlined or planned. Apparently, that post reached farther than anything I'd posted this year. People who didn't even know Ilana shared our pain. Almost 800 people reacted to it, which was pretty insane to me.

What stayed with me wasn’t the number itself. It was that something I wrote without outlining, optimizing, or overthinking reached people more deeply than almost anything else I’d made this year.

I think there’s something in that.

A new era of content begins

One final update for this issue is a change I’m making to my videos. I'm losing the teleprompter and "sort of" rebooting the channel.

I feel like I'm in a position in my life where I want to be more expressive and less robotic. Writing down a few pointers makes that easier for me. I created an introduction video on YouTube that you can watch here. Let me know if you vibe with the new delivery or not: