rebeccapurple
I came across this almost-nine-year-old post yesterday, linked to from an innocuous article about CSS color formats. It’s a response to the proposal that a named color be added to the CSS spec as a tribute to the writer’s daughter.
This morning that tab was still open, and I clicked through to the Rebecca category on his blog and started reading through the archive of posts he’s written in the years since. I fell apart almost immediately. I couldn’t help but see the face of my little girl as I read the words of another dad who’d lost his on her sixth birthday.
I can’t begin to imagine what it would feel like if something happened to my daughter—the unspeakable pain that Eric and Kathryn Meyer have lived through. It’s the pain foreshadowed by Hamilton and Burr singing “I’ll make the world safe and sound for you” to children they would each lose in their lifetimes (spoilers for American history). I hope Megan and I never have to live through that, but in a world where the unthinkable happens far too often, it’s a specter that’s never far enough away.
When I set up Diapers & Coffee I used a template as a starting point and just left the colors as they were, including whatever shade of purple it used for links on hover. It seemed appropriate—for this blog especially—to update my CSS and make it rebeccapurple.