One thing about this… I’ve been thinking about it a lot – people who are young may wonder how good friends lose track of each other. What happened is she left the state.

There was no email back then of course and I’ll tell you something else. No one made long distance calls! No one I knew anyway.

I grew up without a phone but that aside, I made the first long distance call of my life when I was 20 years old. I didn’t even know how to do it to tell the truth. I had to be coached and reassured by a friend, the call would actually work dialing “all those numbers”.

It was a really important call (obviously). I made it from her phone – her father paid her bills for her so it was actually on his dime but you get the idea.

The last time I saw her she was home visiting and then she went back. She did not have an address at the time – she was moving. I did – I lived with the soldier in our first apartment as a matter of fact but we moved from there.

One thing about kids is they don’t tend to leave forwarding addresses so you see what can happen.

By the time there was an Internet… she was already gone.

Arrgh.

I have missed her my whole life and I guess I want to say, if you are young, you don’t know how lucky you are you can easily stay in contact with your friends.

Say what you want about facebook. With that thing around, things like this don’t happen.

I am going through the same exact same thing.
I google a friends name 5 days ago.
She died in July car accident. I found the phone number and address and I didn’t make the call yet.
Been contemplating what to do. Thought maybe I would send a Christmas card with hope you are having a good holiday. Your in my thoughts etc.
It will be the 1st holiday without her for the husband and mother. Not sure what to do Elsa but now that you say calling really upset them thinking the christmas card is the way to go..?

{{{Elsa}}}

Just dug out the pictures i have of her. Scanning them for the family.

Lots of love to you Elsa XXXX

i’ve lost touch with some of my best friends from my youth for very similar reasons.
facebook has helped me find some of them. but i’m horrible with names and have forgotten the last names of some of them (they just weren’t that big a deal at the time) so i can’t google them effectively makes me wish i’d grabbed yearbooks from some of those schools/places

I’m sorry.

Finding friends are gone is a real piss cutter.

I’ve had similar situations. For me, communicating with the deceased’s friends and relatives is a form of sharing and keeping the person alive, at least in spirit. Even if I don’t know the relatives or friends, we shared the love of that person so that makes us simpatico in my book. I realize others do not feel that way. But take my grandpa, for example, he’s been dead quite a number of years but there are still some old-timers around here who really knew him and they are benevolently disposed towards all us grandkids, because they knew grandpa and we remind them of him and vice versa, the memory and spirit are alive in that way.

Suckage.

I had a similar experience of finding out a long-lost friend had died many years before, after another of my previously fruitless internet searches turned up an organization who was archiving their old newsletters (from pre-net) into PDFs… and there I found a death notice. It hit me hard.

Thanks for the reminder about Facebook’s utility. I’ll go friend you there now.

so sorry…(((elsa)))

:-/ sorry elsa.

I am so sorry to hear that…..do you think maybe she (your friend) came into your thoughts for a reason?

Forgive me for sounding too “new agey” but maybe she was reaching out to you? Haven’t we all had dreams/sudden thoughts about someone we have not seen in years, only to find out they have passed on?

Don’t beat yourself up for contacting her family – how could you have possibly known? And like I said, maybe your friend came into your thoughts because she wanted you to know?

I always go back and forth about things like this – I don’t know what to believe myself – but I have had more than one moment where I felt someone who passed on was trying to connect with me……(no, I am not drinking, lol)

I’m sorry for your loss. {{elsa}}

It sounds as if her family misses her too, what a wonderful gift of the pictures and even though it is just so very hard to know she is gone, I think it helps the family to know she was loved by you.

I had hoped for a happier ending. So sorry, E. (((Elsa)))

(((Reality)))

Yikes. I’m sorry to hear about your friend. So young…

When my brother died, I only had one picture of him that was a few years old. He didn’t like to be photographed. If it makes you feel any better, I loved that a good friend of his had sneakily taken a photo of him about a month before he left us and sent it to me. She had it printed in an 8×10 size, and I’ve held onto it since. It’s all that I have other than some childhood shots and his pocket dictionary…

I can also relate. All that was left of my mother’s side of the family was a step-mother and step-sister; whom we were close with at one point but they drifted apart.

My aunt (the step-sister) was big into astrology and I looked up to her very much – she was an incredible person.

After more than 18 years of separation, I searched for her online in January with vigor only to find her obituary: she’d passed away before Christmas. :/

(((luci)))