“So, what are you headed to Texas for?” asked the woman in the airport lounge last week.

“Well, I’ve got this friend,” I said, and took a deep breath. “We’ve never met, but we were online coworkers for a few years. We talked every day. And now he’s really sick.”

I explained that Kurt was in the intensive care unit with multiple organ failure. His vital signs had nosedived twice, what people on TV medical dramas call “flatlining” and real medical personnel call “crashing”. They managed to shock his heart back into rhythm, but since then, he hadn’t regained consciousness.

“And y’all have never met?” the woman – her name was Sharon – asked.

“No,” I said, “and I might just get there in time to squeeze his hand while he’s in a coma and say goodbye. But for a couple of years, he was the first person I’d check in with every morning.”

It was only when I watched the parade of expressions that passed over Sharon’s face that I kicked myself for not just saying: “I’m going to a wedding.” Sometimes I forget to be blithe and casual when people ask me a question, and then I end up feeling like I just made like my cat did the other morning and unceremoniously dumped a dead bird into their lap.



Regardless, there I was, flying to Texas on air miles donated by friends to meet someone whose favorite comic book I knew, whose cats’ names I knew, whose first wedding dance song choice I knew, but whom I’d never met in the flesh, never hugged, never walked down the street with. And for all I knew, he would never know I was even there before he died.

I would hardly be alone, in our social media age, in grieving someone I’ve never met in person. These days, we show our food online, our outfits, our birthdays, wedding parties and promotions at work. And we share our injuries, our broken hearts, our grief and now our deaths.

Twice, I have read people’s suicide notes on Facebook as I scrolled through my morning feed. One friend – a guy I met at an LGBT recovery meeting in Atlanta who relapsed – was successful. For the other, I was able to work with other online friends to contact local authorities and have him remanded to medical care.

He’s fine now, so far as I know, but it was a hell of a thing to stumble upon between ads for Christian Mingle and Amazon Prime deals.

Other friends have lost their fights with cancer, addiction or other diseases. I get notifications on their birthdays, which is always unnerving.

I was one of the people lucky enough to know Aids activist Spencer Cox, who had a hilarious, irreverent, righteous, sarcastic online presence. We never met in person, but we had many late-night Facebook chats in which I confided things to Spencer that I’ve never told anyone –not my partner, not my twin brother and certainly not my parents.

When Spencer died in 2012, I wasn’t the only person who’d never met him in “real life” but grieved him like a childhood friend.

“The day he died, I had to leave work because I couldn’t stop crying at my desk,” one friend told me.

“I wouldn’t have seen New York again if I hadn’t met Spencer through Facebook,” said another who – like many of us – traveled to a memorial and celebration of Spencer’s life a few weeks after his death. Her Facebook Memories, she said, are “constantly painful” because of all the hundreds of comments Spencer left behind.

I spoke with other friends who have lost people they only knew online, and many of them have similar stories of being shocked at how hard the loss of a person they only really knew as an abstraction, a personality at the other end of their internet connection, hit them.

“We talked daily for hours, for a few years,” said one friend of an online acquaintance who succumbed to a brain tumor. “I still have his name in my contacts, and every time I see it my heart lurches.”

“He died in 2007,” another friend said of a blogger she read and admired. “I only talked to him on the phone that one time, but he really felt like a friend.”

Kurt did not die. In fact, when he heard my voice in his ICU room, his eyes flew open. He was there with us, unable to speak around the ventilator tube down his throat, but able to nod, shake his head and even be kind of a smartass. He is continuing to improve and now I have a new friend in the real world who is actually my old friend from the internet.

When we get close to people online, we run the same risk as getting close to people in the real world: that we will love them and then lose them. And yet, just like in the real world, we reach out anyway, because that’s the kind of creatures we are: ones who crave emotional connection, be it across cyberspace or right across the table.