Outliving your own child.

My wife was rushed by ambulance to the area hospital with post-partum complication at about 48 hours.

Then seven days latter our new born was rushed off to the same hospital with suspected meningitis - she spent nearly 2 week there starting in NICU.

Both wife and daughter survived, although both were pretty hard to go through at the time.

If either of them ended for the worse it would have been crushing - if both of these had ended badly I suspect it would be fairly well up there

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???

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

I think that you can make most tragedies worse in a fairly-mechanical fashion. Whatever it is, it's probably worse if you're being stung by bees at the same time, for example. So trying to come up with the very worst tragedy seems like it'd be pretty hard. You could list some bad tragedies...

Hard to imagine anything worse than losing your child.

In a way it's a bad thing to have a competition who has the worst. We all suffer one way or the other, and we should lift each other up.

Anyway, here are my top entries:

• abuse by one's parents
• loss of a loved one
• refusal to get help

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 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 wouldn't say "the worst", but being abused by your own birthparents are probably in the top 10. Literally breaks your brain. Much depression.

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

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.

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?

Watch Grave of the Fireflies. I feel that's pretty high on the totem pole of pain.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/grave_of_the_fireflies

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.

alzheimers or losing one to it.

I think Anterograde amnesia Is pretty high on the list.

Indifference.

Death of a loved one by unnatural causes.

The greatest tragedy a person could experience is the one they do experience.

Being born.

Believing one's tragedy is the greatest

A whole feast of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated martian meat, and little baby birdy feet... But you don't have a spoon. 😔