Friendship and Death in an Electronic Age
We live online. Why not die there too?
This isn’t my story to tell
But someone’s gotta sing the rain. There’ll be gaps and holes, long stretches of cobwebbed time that are opaque, that fiction would never allow. Only real-life gets to be this patchy, this empty, this devoid of mercy and meaning.
This isn’t the story of a loss that touches me closely, a relationship severed in full flood like the blood that oozes from a cat’s claw when you cut too close to the quick. This is something else. An echo of loss felt so long ago that it can only reach me in the silent space between heartbeats, and a dull feeling of regret at the wasted potential of a life completely misspent.
We hadn’t spoken in almost twenty years. We hadn’t been friends for half our lifetimes.
But through the creepy voyeuristic magic of social media, I just learned that a kid I grew up with will never make it to his fortieth birthday.
This is how we experience loss now, the ones that are close enough to make us feel something but distant enough not to mean much. And already, former school friends are posting to their feeds, talking about how badly they’ll miss a guy they may not have spoken to in years. I won’t. I’ll post it here instead.
