I'm sorry, I shouldn't be so choked up over a guy I never met in person, but I really considered him a friend. We're are going through the same thing, but slightly opposite you see. He was coming to the USA and I was going to UK, both of us to be with our partners. We both went through some of the same bad experiences but pushed through them. Christ, he owned rats- like me! I'm really shaken up about it. I had no idea. I knew that he was ill, but he said it was just anxiety and over-work, something I knew about quite keenly, another connection you know? It's just awful to think that I will never meet him now, never know him in person. All I have now are some ing PMs from him and that sort of thing. How does one remain content with those?
I have known one or two folks who have passed online, but not well. They were clanmates in a clan network so extensive no one person knew everyone well. I did not know Osceola at all, and that is why I never said anything in his memorial thread. That would be disrespectful, but I understood the need for others to express their grief. Now I get to feel what it is like to have someone removed from my life without ever meeting them, but having that same wrenched feeling of truly knowing them and losing that small bit of joy.
I'm shocked and wounded just as I would have been with a close relative or friend's sudden passing. I consider online friends the equivalent of the Pen Pal from twenty years ago. People we may never meet in person, never get to hug or buy a drink but they remain forever impressed on our minds in their words. A friend told me once that:
"As the relationship is more in the abstract, through the written word, it's easy for the imagination to fill in the blanks, so the person, even if you only communicated a few times, seems like the best fellow on the planet."
While I do tend to agree that we fill in the little holes left in a person's life we are also not to far off the mark as the written word can be so telling, so honest in it's simplicity. I would like to think that Calvin was quite sincere with me and everyone he knew here. For my part I hope that he knew I was just as sincere when we spoke. We had the same dreams and goals, the same bad bumps in our past, the same pets. We worked with one another in the content department and i got to know his creative and impressionistic side. Such a sweet feller too when you came right down to it, his faults and his virtues. He was like the mirrored me in a way even down to our sex being opposite! I have need to do something for him, but the online memorials that some of the other guys are proposing seem too paltry for me right now. Perhaps a day or two will see my mind changed on that.
I'm really thankful for your letter to me just now. It's a striking piece of serendipity. I did not expect a reply at all, but yours has been so grand to receive in return that I cannot thank you enough. I hope I shall never feel surprised and always obliged by such seemingly small acts of kindness that affect me in such a big way. Perhaps in your words I have found that small bit of virtu that made Calvin such a great guy. I shall keep this in remembrance of him and I hope as a groundwork for our own acquaintanceship.