The Unlikely Tech of Grief: How a Simple 'Let Them' Became a System for Survival

In the chaotic aftermath of loss, the human mind seeks patterns, protocols, and scripts to follow. For Connie Sherburne, who lost her husband of 31 years in a 2020 plane crash, the initial response was pure pragmatism—a system reboot. "I went home that evening, and the next morning, I got up and I thought, 'Hit the ground running. You've got all this to take care of.'" Her first task was a straightforward data migration: transferring insurance for her late husband's truck into her own name. The process, handled by a lone insurance agent in a pandemic-empty office, was efficient. Then, the agent paused, made deliberate eye contact, and delivered what would become Sherburne's most critical piece of code for survival: "Let them."

This wasn't just empathetic advice; it was a functional directive. In software development, we have dependency managers like npm or pip. They automate the process of fetching and integrating external libraries, recognizing that building everything from scratch is inefficient and often impossible. Sherburne, a self-reliant person, was essentially trying to run her life with a minimal dependency tree. The agent's advice was a permission slip to npm install help—to accept the external packages her community was offering. The advice carried weight because of its delivery: "It didn't take her but a few minutes to take care of why I was there," Sherburne recalled. "When she got done, she stopped and she looked at me across her desk, and she made sure that I was looking at her — that she had my full attention." The clarity and force of the instruction cut through her default settings.

The immediate implementation was practical. Sherburne's home heating system relied on firewood, a task her husband had always managed. Instead of attempting to learn a new skill under extreme duress, she asked a friend. The result was a cascade of support: "So many, many people did little things and big things to help me," Sherburne said. "One of the neighbors actually cooked for me for four years — dinners — and her husband delivered the dinners to me." This mirrors how robust software ecosystems thrive—not through isolated, monolithic applications, but through interconnected modules where each component handles a specific function. The neighbor's kitchen became a dedicated microservice for sustenance, delivering its API via her husband.

The counter-argument to accepting help is often rooted in a cultural emphasis on self-sufficiency, a value system that can be as rigid as legacy code. In tech, we see this in the "not invented here" syndrome, where teams reject external solutions in favor of building their own, often at great cost. For Sherburne, the internal resistance was similar: "I wasn't the kind of person to reach out to others for help." The advice "Let them" acted as a refactoring of that mindset. It didn't demand she become dependent; it allowed her to delegate specific, manageable tasks, keeping her core system—her emotional and mental processing—free to handle the more complex operations of grief.

Years later, Sherburne returned to the insurance office to express her gratitude, only to find the agent had moved on. The agent likely never knew the impact of her brief intervention. This is a common pattern in both open-source communities and human interactions: the most significant contributions are often small, well-documented commits that others build upon. The agent provided a clean, readable interface for a complex emotional problem.

The story resonates in tech circles because it illustrates a fundamental principle of systems design: resilience comes from redundancy and interconnection, not from isolated strength. A single server is a single point of failure. A distributed network can withstand shocks. Similarly, a person trying to shoulder every burden alone is fragile. By accepting help, Sherburne built a resilient network around herself. The advice was a simple algorithm: when offered assistance, execute accept(help). The result was a more stable, supported system capable of processing the heavy load of grief.

For developers and engineers, the takeaway is a reminder that the most elegant solutions are often the simplest. In a field obsessed with complexity and optimization, the human element remains the most critical dependency. The insurance agent didn't write a line of code, but she deployed a patch that fundamentally improved the performance of a grieving widow's system. It's a testament to the idea that sometimes, the most powerful technology isn't a framework or a language, but a well-timed, well-delivered piece of advice that reconfigures how we interact with our own support networks.