Sometimes I Hate the Web
I met C online. She was introduced to me by a lesbian friend whom I have known under complex circumstances for several years, introduced as my friend's new partner. A pair of Californians, they had managed to immure themselves in a very dark and holy corner of the land, not exactly the place you would predict a left-coast lesbian couple could thrive. They did not: their relationship lasted about two years.
During that time I exchanged scores of emails, chat messages, and phone calls with the couple. I discovered that C was a brilliant, multi-faceted, very funny and very complicated woman. She also had spent her life struggling with depression and more serious forms of mental illness, and I got the idea she could be very challenging to live with. C was devastated when my friend ended their relationship, but when I last spoke with her she seemed to have brought her fears under control. She was facing surgery but seemed to be facing it confidently.
I never heard from her after that. No luck with phones or emails, then more recently I fell to googling her. She had so triumphed over her inner demons that her private terrors were balanced by a successful and very public professional life, so Google nearly always had some information when other sources failed. Eventually--inevitably so when your acquaintance with someone is electronic--my searches became less frequent. I had not tried to find her since the middle of last summer, and for some reason googled her tonight.
C is dead.
My search brought up a gamer's link (I knew that was one of her passions). I read through the thread carefully, seeking some evidence of a prank, but this was no prank. She had died after her operation, whether of complications or by her own hand is still unclear, for she lived in a state where "Freedom of Information" is an airy abstraction, and there are no facts for mere cyber-friends.
The Web seems a particularly cold place when you learn through it that someone close to you is gone. The site where I found the thread was full of most spontaneous and heartfelt expressions of grief at this news. These were people like me who had known C only as a phone voice and as words on a screen, but their sadness was as immediate as that of those who had known her in daily life. One has to set against the electronic isolation that C touched so many lives.
One can also trot out all the cliches. In the time since I stopped hearing from C, I have been conscious of a void in my life. It is hard to learn that the void can never be filled.
During that time I exchanged scores of emails, chat messages, and phone calls with the couple. I discovered that C was a brilliant, multi-faceted, very funny and very complicated woman. She also had spent her life struggling with depression and more serious forms of mental illness, and I got the idea she could be very challenging to live with. C was devastated when my friend ended their relationship, but when I last spoke with her she seemed to have brought her fears under control. She was facing surgery but seemed to be facing it confidently.
I never heard from her after that. No luck with phones or emails, then more recently I fell to googling her. She had so triumphed over her inner demons that her private terrors were balanced by a successful and very public professional life, so Google nearly always had some information when other sources failed. Eventually--inevitably so when your acquaintance with someone is electronic--my searches became less frequent. I had not tried to find her since the middle of last summer, and for some reason googled her tonight.
C is dead.
My search brought up a gamer's link (I knew that was one of her passions). I read through the thread carefully, seeking some evidence of a prank, but this was no prank. She had died after her operation, whether of complications or by her own hand is still unclear, for she lived in a state where "Freedom of Information" is an airy abstraction, and there are no facts for mere cyber-friends.
The Web seems a particularly cold place when you learn through it that someone close to you is gone. The site where I found the thread was full of most spontaneous and heartfelt expressions of grief at this news. These were people like me who had known C only as a phone voice and as words on a screen, but their sadness was as immediate as that of those who had known her in daily life. One has to set against the electronic isolation that C touched so many lives.
One can also trot out all the cliches. In the time since I stopped hearing from C, I have been conscious of a void in my life. It is hard to learn that the void can never be filled.
posted by Uncle | 00:32
2 Comments:
A nice thing about an electronic friend is that you can wildly speculate about your friend's death as a suicide while having no evidence to support it. Shame on you.
And YOU are?
Perhaps you knew the person I wrote about? Perhaps you cared about her as much as the members of the group I cited, who knew, as I knew, how tenuous was our friend's hold on life? Perhaps you know something that has eluded all the people who have tried to find out what happened? Perhaps you have some less plausible reason for sharing your holier-than-thou attitude and intruding upon other peoples' grief?
I am not troubled by pious attitudes toward suicide. I knew my friend well enough to think such an end would have been preferable for her. She would have thought it far better than the "natural" death the holy prefer, alone and frightened. I do not know what happened, as less obnoxious people may have noted from my comments, but I know much more of the circumstances than you suppose.
I usually reject such offensive replies, but I'll make an exception here. I will wildly speculate that you get off on being so insulting, confident that your boorishness will be rejected. I cannot allow you that luxury.
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