How do you feel if you learn that an online friend has died?

I belong to a forum that is related to the retirement area where I live. There have been a couple of our members to die since I’ve been a member. It is sad and they are missed. Death is always an empty, sad feeling. Maybe because it jolts a reality in us that this life is temporary. But to me, it wasn’t like a real life friend dying. Maybe because I hadn’t meet them in real life.

One of our members had a highschool aged grandson die after being on life support from an accidental drug overdose. That was really emotional and sad for me. I think because it was a young person and because the forum member posted all sorts of photos of his grandson enjoying himself in our community. It was like we knew him.

I know you have a lot going on in your life, @janbb. Take care of yourself physically and emotionally. I say this with cyber love and concern for you and from experience, I know how easy it is to misplace your emotions at a time like this. Death is always sad, but keep it in perspective.

I have a friend who died of cancer earlier this year. I just got an email from Linkedin saying it’s his two-year anniversary at “Not Employed” and I should congratulate him. His Facebook page is still up.

My point is that online relationships seem strangely persistent. Automated services keep them going. Their fingerprints are still all over the internet. It is hard to feel like they are really gone.

I remember when a dear friend from Answerbag disappeared suddenly, and in my search for them I found an obituary that fit what I knew of them. It was deeply saddening. I still miss that guy from time to time.

Hell, I cried my eyes out when @Coloma was having a hard time re-homing Marwyn and nearly had him euthanised. My online friends are my friends. I don’t see a compelling difference between the two forms of friendship.

No, but I am worried about a few jellies who were apart of this site. They just sort of disappeared from the internet. One of them was battling cancer.

In this week’s Mad Man season opener, the character Roger Sterling finds himself unable to feel sad over the death of his mother (although it does bring up a range of other emotions), but when he learns his shoe shine man of many years has also died, he breaks down and weeps. One critic attributed this simply to his losing the man who polished his shoes so well, but I saw it as a trigger for Roger to release his deep sadness about his mother, with whom he’d had a difficult relationship.

That’s happened to me many times—one seemingly unrelated event bringing up a buried emotion about something else. How I react or don’t react emotionally to the death of a relative, friend, near-friend, stranger, or even someone I never met but in some way connect to is, for me, unpredictable.

@bkcunningham I am not overwhelmed by this; I may have misrepresented my reaction. I was just wondering whether others have experienced it.

I still try to find info about Cak and Gary. Gary in particular touched my heartstrings. People are continuing to send Cak messages (such as birthday wishes) on her Facebook page, which gives me some hope, but she never responded.

Certainly on fluther, I feel moderately connected to many members of the community and very attached to a small group. I figure if I know someone’s weight, height, BP. cholesterol numbers, and intimate sexual habits, we are friends and I would be sad for the loss.

It’s no I secret I belong to a prostate cancer support group. Even though I am fine and have perfect numbers I still look in occasionally because I have formed a deep bond with some of the members. Two died in the past month. (Family members were kind enough to notify us) One knew the end was near and showed truly remarkable grace right to the end. The other didn’t see it coming. He was so upbeat and planning his activities and, Bam!, lights out. Rereading their last few posts is eerie and makes me a little sad.

I imagine it depends on how much you liked and knew that person.

I’d be saddened if a few online friends died.

I would be very sad if many of the people that I knew on Fluther had died. These are real relationships to me.

I was deeply saddened for quite some time when I found out that a fellow jelly had a terminal disease and then disappeared from Fluther all together. He was a great man and will be missed dearly.

I have an online friend that I began talking to a couple of years ago. He’s a little younger than I am and he had a bad childhood, so he has some mental health issues. He was going through a hard time and his depression and emotional behavior was stressing me out. He texted me to tell me he was going to kill himself.

My immediate reaction was anger. What was I supposed to do from hundreds of miles away? I had no clue where he was and he was so out of it that there was nothing I could say to fix the situation. He didn’t kill himself, but I chose to stop talking to him after that. I couldn’t handle the amount of responsibility he was putting on me.

He got back on his feet, found a job and a place to live, and started seeing a therapist and taking his meds. A few months later, he reconnected with me to apologize and we’re now on speaking terms again, though we aren’t as close as we once were.

If he had killed himself and I found out about it, I would’ve been sad, of course. I’m not sure if I would’ve made an effort to attend a funeral like I would for a real-life friend, but it would’ve made me feel bad. In his case, I probably would feel some guilt as well.

I would feel the same about an online friend as I would about a real-life friend. There’s a different level of intimacy with online friends that almost makes them more “real.”

I had an online friend who disappeared into depression for a while and I worried just as I would a IRL friend. It was almost harder because I couldn’t go over and say, “Hey, let’s go to the Botanic Gardens, ehm?”

I have always distanced myself from the community vibe & maintain my stance that these places are merely words on a screen, but I reckon i’d be genuinely moved if any of the folks I find cool popped their clogs…anything else would be just plain heartless.

My friend who I rarely see IRL just lost her 3 year old daughter this January. I had only seen her daughter twice in her entire life, but hearing about her death really hit me hard. Partly it was because I have a daughter a year younger, but mostly because of the strange nature of Internet friendships. My friend posted pics and updates several times a day and I didn’t realize how much a part of my life her family had become even though we never meet up IRL.

Her daughter died in an unexpected accident and for the longest time I kept looking at the last posts and pictures of the little girl. I kept thinking “Wow.. nobody knew that would be the last picture of her.” “Wow. That was the last time she went to the grocery store…” “Wow..that was the last <whatever>”

If you had asked me the day before she died what I thought about this little girl, I would have mentioned some funny posts or pics, but I really didn’t think of her much on one level. But the FB friendship made this little girl so real and alive to me. Losing her was like losing a neighbor.

@keobooks You wrote: “Wow.. nobody knew that would be the last picture of her.” “Wow. That was the last time she went to the grocery store…” “Wow..that was the last <whatever>”

That is exactly how I feel about the two guys in the group. I read their posts and think “What would they be writing if they knew this was the end of the line? Would they be writing to long lost relatives or friends? Would they be righting any wrongs? Or performing some kindness?” The one guy knew… he commented how his spelling and typing skills had degenerated and asked our forgiveness. The other guy knew he was sick but felt great even though it had spread throughout his body. One of the last things he wrote was “I feel fine. The only reason I know I have prostate cancer is because some doctor gave me a blood test and told me I have it.” He was 64.

What you posted reminded me of something I was hesitant to mention. My friend’s husband is a political blowhard sometimes. And morning morning he posted something or other that I found particularly offensive and I was tempted to give him the heave ho on FB. It was just some semi-paranoid rant against the government per usual from him.

The really really hard thing – was while he was posting this, his my friend and her son were still asleep in bed and he was on his way to work. His daughter was dead in her bedroom and nobody knew yet. He posted later about wanting to kick himself for posting something so trivial and angry while his whole life had changed and he didn’t even know it yet. He said in his dreams, he stops writing that post and runs into his daughter’s room and saves her life. Even though it was likely she was already gone, he feels so terrible for posting “crap” online instead of seeing his daughter one last time – or saving her life.

He makes some amazing posts now about how he and his wife and surviving son are getting through this, and I see this side of him that I had no idea ever existed. He has started posting his political stuff now and then, but he posts all this really amazing stuff about grief and living on and now HE feels like a friend to me, when before he was just my friend’s husband before.

Net friendships are tricky things. Strangers share intimate thoughts and secrets so much that sometimes the “strangers” know each other better than the real life best friends. Online people aren’t just random blips on the radar.

@keobooks Beautifully stated.

@janbb – thanks for forgiving the TERRIBLE typos I just noticed. BLEAH.

@keobooks You wrote: “Net friendships are tricky things. Strangers share intimate thoughts and secrets so much that sometimes the “strangers” know each other better than the real life best friends. Online people aren’t just random blips on the radar.”

Oh man! I wish I could give you more than one GA!

I’m so distrustful of people in real life. I’m even more distrustful of online people.

On behalf of all of us who have experienced the loss of a friend, may I extend our sincere empathy for your sense of loss. If there is a way you can pay tribute to that person where she was known, I suggest you do that. Express what her friendship meant to you. Perhaps that will be an helpful outlet for your feelings.

I will feel sad, anyway, she is the person you have met and contacted.

I haven’t been in this forum for very long but already I have begun to have genuine feelings for and friendships with a number of you jellies and I would be very upset if anything happened to you especially as I am so far away and would not be able to contact or send my condolences.

One of my old buddies died recently and I couldn’t get in contact with her family as I couldn’t find them. We’d lost contact overtime but I’d never stopped loving my friend, I was shattered and only found out by accident she’d died. I found her work email and even though I knew she was gone I still wrote to her and told her how much I loved her and our fun times together and told her how much I will miss her. She was a real life friend who I was able to hang onto for a bit longer in cyber space.

At the funeral for the guy who died suddenly the family printed out about 100 posts he and others had made. It was very touching.