Death On the Internet Superhighway

Sadly, two friends my age passed away last year from cancer.  Both were on facebook.  One was a local friend, so the fact that we were facebook friends was of no significance.  I periodically check to see if her family has removed her account, but it's still up there.  I suppose it's the least of her husband's worries, with three teenage girls.  My heart breaks for them.

The other friend, I had lost contact with from 1981-2010.  We reconnected on facebook, and I'm so thankful we did.  Jack was in my high school church youth group.  He was an unusual character.  His parents were from England or Scotland; I can't remember.  He was one of those non-athletic boys, very bright and funny, and the girls loved him, probably because he was so accepting of everyone.  He was also a bit of a devil.  Jack would bring AC/DC cassette tapes and other forbidden music on our trips.  He even posted a photo from back in the day where he's in bed with a girl on one of our trips and they are holding what looks to be bottles of beer (probably root beer).  Jack was full of harmless fun.  I never knew what happened to him until finding him online.  I wasn't really surprised to learn that he'd earned his Ph.D. and was a college professor.  He still enjoyed traveling and would follow his favorite bands (Radiohead and U2), landing in different cities to see their concerts.  We had some good discussions, via private messages, about our past and present lives.  He told me about the cancer, which he'd been battling for over a year.  He would post periodic updates under 'Notes' on his wall.  When he entered the hospital for the last time, his sister took over his account and would post daily updates about his condition.  Finally, she asked that anyone who wanted, post final messages to him on his wall.  It was not an easy thing to do, but I was grateful for this technology and was touched by the hundreds of people who posted goodbyes to him.  Many were his former students who all said that he was their favorite professor/teacher ever.  Again, I wasn't surprised.  A lecture in his classroom could have never been boring.  People like to diss facebook, but I'm glad for it because of experiences like this.

Over the past year, I've also reconnected with many college friends, who live all over.  We've talked about getting together for a mini-reunion with all of our former college of business buddies.  One such friend was mentioned time and again by everyone.  No one had seen or heard from him in quite a long time.  Tom was near and dear to me back in college.  Without going into too much detail, he wasn't a boyfriend per se, but we were very close, and one of my actual boyfriends said he didn't ask me out for over a month because he thought Tom and I were a couple. Tom was one of those happy-go-lucky types who, unfortunately, didn't take school seriously enough.  He would always talk me into weird adventures, like standing in line at the downtown department store to walk through SantaLand and see Santa.  Or the time he tried to talk me into eloping with him, saying we could get married by a justice of the peace and then have it annulled on Monday.  I declined!  Jack dropped out of college, but we continued to talk on the phone and see each other when he came back into town.  Then I got married and our friendship went by the wayside.  We'd exchange Christmas cards, but that was it.  I sent him a Happy 30th birthday card in 1993 and he gave me a call.  He was living in Tampa and that was the last time I heard from him.

Periodically, I'd google him and kept hoping he'd pop up on facebook.  I found it strange that I couldn't locate him, because he had an unusual last name.  Last December, I took up my search again, spurred on by all our facebook friends who wondered where he was.  My stomach dropped to the floor when the first hit turned up on findagrave.com.  I wasn't familiar with the site, but someone takes photos of gravestones and posts them online, by cemetery.  The gravestone was his; I knew his birth date and the cemetery was in his hometown.  And he had died in 1996......he had been gone over15 years and none of us knew.  I frantically searched online for an obit, but it was too long ago.  It was with a very sad heart that I had to tell all these other people what I had discovered.

This was one of those times that I was not grateful for the internet.  I'd have been happy going on, thinking that Tom was alive and well and enjoying the Florida sun.