Online friends that pass away

K

Kaya

Senior Member
Location
Northern Cali
Anyone experience that? I know...debbie downer subject but lets face it..many of us are online a lot, and make friends as well as enemies...and they don't live forever.

It is not always pleasant to find out a friend has passed. Or not find out at all and one minute there are there as always..the next...not there. And no way to find out what happened unless a family member tells someone in their email addy book then passes it on and that person knows where they hung out.

I think since the time I have been on the net...about 7 have passed on.
 
Three from the forum I have been on since 2006. All too young-one ovarian cancer (she had just adopted a baby from China as she was never able to have children of her own),the other two from breast cancer-one in her 50s and the other just 38 with 11 and 14 year olds. She had been battling breast cancer since she was 30. She passed just last November.
 
I haven't been on many forums at all, but I've known two very nice ladies online who passed on. One was from a 'women getting fit over 50' group I belonged to years back, she was older, and devoted her time to rescuing stray cats, and volunteering at a shelter. Some of us from the group gave a donation to the shelter she volunteered at, in her name. The other lady was from NatMedTalk, the health forum. She was suffering from COPD in her golden years, and it got the best of her. :( It's amazing how emotional it can be to lose someone, even though you've only known them through conversation on a website.
 
I have lost touch with quite a number, no doubt some have died. But I don't regard people I meet in cyberspace as 'friends'.
 
Problem is when you're chatting with someone in cyberspace,you believe everything they tell you.

Like Justme said " I don't regard people I meet in cyberspace as 'friends'."
 
This thread brings to mind something very unpleasant that I had forgotten about.
Years ago I worked with a guy at a big company that I had a casual friendship with, like many people there. When I left the company for a new job, he got my email address from a girl that I continued to stay in touch with.
Like others, he would send silly jokes and stuff. Never thought anything about it.
Then one email came that was an invitation to lunch. I just wrote back thanks ... but I really didn't care to do that. It struck me as odd at the time.
About two weeks later, my girlfriend from the company sent me the notice of his obituary .. he had committed suicide!
There were no details about his death. He left nothing explaining his actions. He was in his 30's, and seemed well liked and of normal mind.
I really didn't know him, either working around him for a couple years or online! It shook me up for a while, hoping I had nothing to do with that.
 
Bonnie, You couldn't have known what was in his mind. I had two really close friends that committed suicide. One was always the life of the party, and you wouldn't thought he do that. None of us had any idea that he would drink himself to death. He left a note saying no one cared. The other was a girl that I did see it coming, and I spent weeks trying to get her to seek help. One evening she just stepped in front of a 18 wheeler on I-10.
Somehow both of those people had not built enough self respect or strength of character to carry them through life and what it can hold for each of us.
 
Oh,Bonnie.That would have bothered me too! So sad.

I had totally forgotten about the several people who have passed from my Classmates.com group. I got very involved with a group that was not from my high school but from a school a couple of towns away. I happened to see a question about "What ever happened to?...." and that person happens to be my brother`s best friend. My brother is 76 and he and Lenny have been friends since they were 16. So I responded and then just ended up getting really involved with them all and we all "chatted" every day. Then we all met in Reno for a several daylong getogether. Had a blast-even though lots of people were shocked_"You are going to Reno by yourself to meet a bunch of people you don`t even know??!!??" But nobody turned out to be weird-just a bunch of really nice people.

I became very close with a lady named Lynn-she was a widow who had had a relationship with her husband very much like mine and hubby`s and had a "problem child" with the same problem. My daughter and I would take the grandkids to visit her and she loved them all. She was diabetic and had COPD so her health wasn`t the best but she drove all the way to Reno all by herself in her Hummer so at that time she was doing OK. Sadly,a couple of years later she passed. I still miss her sense of humor and ability to talk about anything and everything. Another one of the group passed a couple of years ago-he was "the baby" of the group-only in his early 40s. He had horrific back issues and ended up bedridden and addicted to painkillers. Not sure if he passed from an overdose or what.

Then there was Richard V.-he was soooo funny. He became ill last year and kind of disappeared from Facebook rather suddenly,then came back and said he`d been ill but was better now. He asked me for info about a TV program that I had mentioned that he hadn`t heard of and we were making jokes back and forth about it. That was the last I ever heard from him-he passed away a few weeks later.
 
And as far as not believing everything people online tell you,Davey,yes,you are right. Luckily,I learned that right from the getgo.I ended up on the forum I was on (and am still on)in 2006 because one of our employees wives was a daycare provider and belonged to this forum.

My daughter was also in daycare so he told me I should tell her about the site. I did and she joined,then started asking me if this Melanie person was his wife. I joined to see and yes,it was obviously her (well,I already knew her name was Melanie). Anyway,this woman was cuckoo. I couldn`t believe the stuff she would talk about and she was SUCH a drama queen. Now,mind you,her husband worked for us for 15 years. We were a small shop,just 8-10 of us there max. He worked side by side with our painter who was with us for 34 years and he and my husband were like father-son.He said that none of the events that she would write about ever happened-and he certainly would have known since he and Joe talked all day.

I soon realized that things she was saying were not exactly true but rather were an attempt to gain sympathy and and,well,just to tell a good story. She told about her house catching fire and them losing nearly everything. Never happened. It was so weird because I KNOW she knew I was on there-as well as my daughter. I ended up saying things that were a dead giveaway as to who I was,just to save her the embarrassment from saying any more. She continued though. She posted one last post about three years ago and has not so much as logged in to read any posts since then. Several of the gals have tried to contact her but no response-these gals knew her personally as they used to have a yearly getogether in Minnesota. I never attended because I don`t fly and when I did meet up with several of them in Vegas,she wasn`t there.
 
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