The Loss of a Friend

Losing a dear friend you’ve known for many years is a sad and painful experience, and many of us know what it's like. It’s bad enough when you know what’s happened to them and the reason for their disappearance, but it’s worse when they suddenly drop out of your life and you’re left completely in the dark. Worse still if you try to get back in touch with them and, try as you might, your efforts come to nothing and you're none the wiser.

Such a situation is not unknown, it happens. But today, owing to the spread of the Internet and the making of online friends, it is something that can and does happen more than ever before, much more. We meet and get to know people online and some of these people we get to know intimately and we become used to their regular online presence. We may go a step further and speak to them in a live chat environment, an instant messaging program, see them on a webcam, talk to them on the phone, and even visit them in person, whether in our own country or abroad.

If we get to know them personally, the inexplicable loss of that friend is felt so much more acutely, even without having had personal contact, thanks to modern technology which enables us to communicate by voice and even to see each other, with the result that we can get very attached to that person, though we never have been in their physical company. Habit, friendship and companionship transcend the physical separation that distance creates between us, and should the person we have come to know and like and perhaps even love through the Internet suddenly disappear without trace we may feel the loss as acutely as if that person were a friend of ours in the more conventional way.

I know what it’s like to lose a friend in such circumstances. It was a person I had met online in the early years of the Internet and we began communicating through instant messaging programs. The conversations we had became a daily thing and we gradually became addicted to our regular chats, to the point that any absence, be it for only one day, became a cause for concern and had to be explained by the absentee on their return. We then supplemented this by phone calls to each other and eventually it progressed to personal visits. And, over time and inevitably I suppose, we became lovers and sweethearts.

This was all some time ago. The relationship eventually broke down, for reasons that I will not go into as they are not pertinent to this post, but nevertheless we remained friends and we kept in contact, mainly online but sometimes by phone. And then one day my once-friend and lover and now just friend, though a dear one, vanished! She stopped coming online. She wasn’t answering her e-mails or the phone. She had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared for good and left me not knowing what had happened to her. Though I had her home address, the question of visiting her was impracticable. She lived in another continent, thousands of miles away, and I could not embark on a trip that would take me half way round the world to visit a person who might not even be there to receive me.

And that is how things have remained to the present day. It has been over a year since I last had any contact with her and, after having tried to get hold of her by one means or another and failed, I fear the worst for her. I imagine that she may not even be with us anymore, that she may have sickened or had an accident and.... I dare not even say the word, as it saddens me greatly to think of her like that. She would be in her late forties now, so she’s still relatively young by today’s standards. I’ve racked my brain in an effort to imagine what may be preventing her from communicating with me and the answer that comes back is always a bleak one.

I’m still hoping that one day I will succeed in getting in touch with her or, failing that, at least in finding out about her, though I fully realise that the news may not be good, and this is my worst fear. But the anguish of not knowing is probably worse than knowing the truth, terrible as it might be. Either way it’s very sad, especially when I think back to when I first met her and how our relationship went on to develop into a close friendship and then bloomed into a romantic liaison which lasted several years. Those were our halcyon days, even though there was many a storm that tested us.

My life will not change if and when I find her or find out about her. We have gone our separate ways since we split up, though we kept in touch. But at the very least I need to know what’s happened to her. “While there’s life there’s hope”, they say, but as the years go by with no news of her, it all begins to look rather hopeless. But I’ve not given up all hope yet. I still feel there’s a chance I will at least find out about her and my ignorance of her circumstances, whatever they may be, will finally come to an end. It may be hoping against hope, but it’s the way it has to be for the moment. For the moment, I live in hope...


P.S. - Since posting the above, I have located the person in question and I now know the truth, though it might have been better if I had not known!