Losing your wife and child during childbirth
It was looking like it might go that way when my child was born. 2 years later I’m still reeling from the fear even though everything worked out fine. That has to be the right answer.
I’m so sorry you had to go through that
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???
Yeah is is. This is it. I was thinking family annihilation, but this is much better criteria.
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
there’s a really cool art bar near me that i think is going to be the thing i miss the most when i leave… if i can leave…
Seeing your whole family wiped out at once.
See: Gaza
Hard to imagine anything worse than losing your child.
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.
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.
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 wouldn’t say “the worst”, but being abused by your own birthparents are probably in the top 10. Literally breaks your brain. Much depression.
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.
Being enslaved probably?
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.
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
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/
Is it really a tragedy when you harm yourself or you own family through you own stupidity?
It’s a tragedy for the child, and their friends, but I wouldn’t say it’s a tragedy for the parents.
It’s basically a Greek tragedy. These people have such hubris to think that they know better than doctors, and they lose their children because of it.
What about when your brain is capable of the mental gymnastics required to deny any culpability in said preventable tragedy? These morons tend to have that superpower.
Being born.
