When Random Acquaintances Die

Even if you hardly knew them they still leave a massive void

Death has got to be the most bizarre emotional sensation. I’m not referring to the person who passes on, but to those of us left behind to reconcile with it even if they’re someone we’re not close to.

Coming to terms with a person being there one day and permanently gone the next is difficult to rationalize. It leaves a gaping hole in what was “normal” before.

One day recently, as I sat here quietly plunking away on my keyboard I heard a piece of paper slide under the front door of my condo. The condo board often slips us notices to advise residents of various things happening in the building.

I picked up the piece of paper but this time it wasn’t about a fire inspection or garage cleaning day. Instead, the message revealed that the president of our condo board passed away suddenly.

I was stunned. I had literally ridden the elevator with him two days earlier just as I have many times before. He lived only a couple doors down from me.

He’s not someone I was close with but as the president, this man had been inside my condo unit many times over the years. I’ve passed him and his wife multiple times in the hallway and enjoyed lovely conversations.

Now he’s just gone. I’ll never run into him at the mailbox again.

I felt an overwhelming desire to reach out to his wife but what would I even say? We’re such surface acquaintances that I wouldn’t feel qualified to knock on her door, yet I feel a terrible sadness for her loss. Instead, I slipped a card under her door and left it at that.

Over the years, many of my random online acquaintances have slipped away. Some were old and some very young, and it never feels normal.

I owned a travel chat forum for several years and became very close with many of our members. I’d even met a good number of them in real life and some remain as close as family to this day.

I’ll never forget the day a random new person created a profile for the forum and logged on to let the community know that one of our members had suddenly died in a motorcycle crash. We were all stunned.

He was very young and a valuable daily contributor to our forum. All of us mourned the loss of someone we’d never even met and it left us silent for days.

I recall feeling so grateful that he must have felt our forum was important enough to talk it up to his outside friends. How else would a stranger have known about us and signed up just to let us know of his passing?

Years later, from that same chat forum, another woman passed away. Alice was the matriarch of our community. When she opened a guest house in the Caribbean several of us traveled to meet and stay with her. We even had huge group dinner parties at her place. She eventually became like a second mother to me.

The day her daughter posted notification on Facebook that she’d passed away, a whole travel community grieved over the loss.

This scenario has played out time and time again throughout the last decade or so. Random acquaintances passing away leaving me with the strange sensation that I’ll never randomly bump into them or see their Facebook updates again.

It happened with this man and this woman recently too, and in both cases, it never felt normal even though I hardly knew them. Neither was a regular part of my daily life yet their deaths were important enough to write about and grieve over.

If not for social media, when someone passes on we would never know why we stop hearing from or seeing our random acquaintances again.

It feels bizarre that we, as a general audience of life can be so privy to someone’s death even though we’re distant contacts who haven’t earned the privilege of first-hand information.

But with social media, we don’t have to wait to hear it through the grapevine or for a newspaper announcement that we may never even stumble across.

Nowadays, the internet keeps us so connected that we have established deep friendships with people we don’t really know. We feel bonded to social contacts without knowing their mother’s names, their children’s names.

We wouldn’t even have an address to send flowers, yet if they were to pass on we’d still feel immense loss because whatever they contributed to our lives no longer exists.

Do you ever wonder who will make the social media announcement for you and what they will say? Do you wonder how many random contacts will feel awkward about leaving their condolences on a page full of your grieving family members?

Will your family even make a public announcement at all or will your online community of acquaintances be left to wonder what happened when you no longer show up online?

Because of social media we have the privilege of getting to know one another and be part of each other’s lives so much that we notice when someone is missing.

It wasn’t long ago when Helen Cassidy Page hadn’t posted in a mere few days and it prompted a whole search party. A fellow writer called her out because they noticed.

It brings a warm yet odd feeling that complete strangers can be so concerned with our well-being because of the internet. These are people we would never even know existed if not for the magic of randomness.

They say the world is a big place but in reality, it’s not so big at all. Because of some wire plugged into a box in your own living room, we’re at a point where we can genuinely care for strangers, celebrate triumphs, and feel a tremendous loss.

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