I really am not a bad person...

[BamaCaveDiver]

You said it quite well Daddy-h2O. Kirwoodd, as you read those one-liners how do you make the determination as to who really was a friend of the deceased and who is just going through the motions? If you dive long enough and often enough, you make new friends. Some will be casual acquaintences while others may become your best friend for life. Even if it is little more than an introduction and a handshake, the common bonds you share tend to intensify the emotions. When we read that a diver has passed, we feel a loss for the community whether we had ever actually met that individual or not. We offer our condolences to those left behind out of compassion for the sport, in the hopes that when our time comes, others will be ther to help those we leave behind cope. I like the split threads as well, like used by TDS; the only problem there comes from all the quarterbacks who start flexing their extreme lack of knowledge as they speculate about what happened. Discussing the accident to prevent future accidents of a similar nature is great, but it only works when known facts are released by those who were on scene (which is typically limited to one or two individuals at most.)

[kirwoodd]

All good points BamaCaveDiver,
I just don't like to sift through the one liners, I feel like TOO many of them are throw away lines. You are correct that I have NO way of knowing which are which, and in fact, just because someone didn't know the victim doesn't mean that they aren't sorry. For instance, maybe it was your favorite dive spot and the victim was a new father, and those two things hit home for you, so you feel a pang. YUP, I get it, and its very therapeutic to post a condolence, I am completely on board..... I HATE reading them. Maybe its because it forces me to consider my own mortality, dunno.

As for the armchair quarterbacks, I don't mind those clowns. I like to read NTSB air transportation reports to learn from them, sadly diving has no real equivalent. But the armchair quarterbacks do make us (well me anyway) consider other things. For instance there was a thread about a possibly overweighted, possibly panicked diver fatality recently on another board. The first 10 or so pages were pretty valuable, yup, LOTS of speculation, but it made me consider both panic and overweighting, were they a factor in that particular accident? I have no idea, but I did learn from others speculations.

[BamaCaveDiver]

That is it exactly Kirwoodd. Feeling unconnected when you read the one liners does not make you a bad person any more than my frustration arising from reading specualtion from the uneducated; it simply menas that we are both human, with our own individual interests and community connections. Unless the speculation gets carried to the point of pure lunacy (which happens more often than not from my experience) I usually attempt to ignore it and find better ways to occupy my time (just because something is put into print on the Internet does not mean that everyone who finds that page is obligated to read its contents.) I try to let those who need to grieve do so, as well as letting those who feel a need to speculate do their thing as well.