For one writer, the death of a long-distance friend results in very real grief — but also leads to deep reflection on how we define and nurture our friendships in the 21st century.
“We are futuristic pen pals.”
I’m looking at the text Gav sent me two months after we met in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2013 on the street outside a bar where I’d been for a friend’s 30th birthday, in a fated moment of same place, same time. Although geographic distance and dissonant work schedules meant much of our relationship was lived online, we found a soul connection. We sustained each other with emails, WhatsApp messages, texts sent at all hours; shared images, shared jokes, an intimacy born of 1 a.m. heart-to-hearts, with similar fears about who we were and hope about who we could become. For a time, we were each other’s “goodnight” and “good morning.”
Though he and I met often and cemented our bond in person, digital platforms kept us connected when life got in the way.
There is a boldness, a lack of inhibition, that comes from typing rather than talking face-to-face. It allows us to be social even when we’re alone. It offers the shy and nervous a space to say what’s on their mind and in their heart. The ellipses of doom and a text being left on read, while wounding, are less so than somebody sitting in silence in front of you or getting up and walking away from you in real life.
The sense of elation an unexpected message brings on a low day is unrivaled; to know that in that moment somebody spontaneously thought about you and reached out is life-giving. And the reverse is true. When we don’t hear from them, we worry. How long do we wait before getting in contact? We question what we said or didn’t say. We panic, thinking that something may have happened to them.
Digital life is designed to connect us. In January 2023, there were 4.8 billion social media users worldwide, and around 23 billion to 27 billion texts are sent per day. The social benefits of digital connection were definitively proved by the myriad platforms that brought us together to work, rest, and play during those long months of lockdowns during the pandemic in 2020. But while some of us bemoaned the number of online events at that time, others were slipping through the cracks into isolation. Many whose well-being relied on routine, busyness, and distraction, and those who struggled with being alone with their thoughts, or with harmful behaviors, were more disconnected than ever.
Gav and I both made the best of those long, strange months, throwing ourselves into work, exploring new ventures, and pivoting our routines as so many of us did in order to stay afloat. Our social accounts showed two people surviving and semi-thriving, if such a thing were possible then, yet our messages to each other expressed worry about “descending into a dark place at the enormity” of the pandemic (me) and being “determined to have a fresh, positive start” post-pandemic (him).
Comparison is the thief of joy
We all know that social feeds are highlight reels of ordinary lives like yours and mine, lived mostly in private, quiet, comfortingly mundane ways. This is not a hot take. Yet, despite our best efforts, it can be hard not to feel FOMO, envy, or even self-loathing at the sight of friends and peers living a best life that looks better than our own.
These curated windows into people’s lives are firmly established as a satisfying and important method of connection; we are interested when people are posting, when there are updates to dissect, devour, discuss, and react to. The disconnection comes when people are absent, when there are no text messages, no status updates; when we can’t be sure if it’s an indication that things are going well for our friends or if they are having a hard time. Have they retreated because their best life is taking place IRL, or for protection? When we don’t have the option to go and ring a friend’s doorbell to check in, we are reliant on our inboxes and social accounts for snippets of information about people whom, if we’re asked, we’d say we are close to.
He and I would at times fluctuate between intense communication and radio silence, and when it was the latter, I worried. He worked long hours. He stayed up all hours. He was an alcoholic. He had shared this news tentatively with me not long after we met, worried I would hate him. I could never. He was multifaceted, not the sum of his addiction. When things were good, we talked daily, sometimes for hours. When things were bad, he retreated; his kindness in not wanting to burden others left me feeling helpless and him alone.
We were really close for about five years, until 2018. There was no falling-out, no rupture; we simply followed the path of too many close friendships and drifted. After that, we’d keep in regular contact, then less frequently, then sporadically over the next few years, depending on how he was or how busy our lives got. Our shared love of quirky cultural references, cats, and more meant that even when there was less time for long conversations, there were still plenty of “saw this and thought of you” messages with a funny image, a weird fact, or a link to an article the other would enjoy. There were the “how’s things?” updates and annual happy birthdays that all of us send, and while they can seem perfunctory, they were always sent with love. At one point, he told me he was in a relationship, and he sounded happy. I thought of him always, telepathically wishing him well. I wanted his life to get easier.
Life got busy, lockdown hit in 2020, and I was dealing with work stress, family crises, loss, and friends who needed me. I was spread thin. I struggled. We are told to build connections, to network both socially and to advance our careers, while simultaneously advised to nurture ourselves. Be present in the moment. Step away from your devices to avoid burnout. How can we do it all? Be there for ourselves, and also for everybody else? I attempted the balancing act, but ultimately couldn’t keep all the plates spinning. When it comes to him, I feel that failure most.
I didn’t hear from him much after the end of 2020, but equally I didn’t reach out as often as I could have (should have?). I tracked him online in my usual worried way. He had, years before, sent me a link to his smartwatch fitness stats so I, an absolute non-athlete, could vicariously share his near-daily runs, and I found myself checking on him that way, as well as via his social accounts.
After a few months of not being in contact — it wasn’t intentional; time just blurred — I read a news article that I knew he would like and sent it to him. It was unread. And it remains unread and will forever because he died. A subsequent internet search informed me that at the end of March 2023, five days after I sent that spontaneous “how are you?,” he passed away suddenly, aged 42, at home, on the west coast of Scotland. An instant, permanent full stop on a decade of connection.
Malte Mueller//Getty Images
Dealing with death in the digital age is very strange, and while the stages of grief I’m experiencing seem to be following a real-life pattern — denial, guilt, shock, sadness, a feeling that there’s no point in continuing without this person who inspired me to want a life (and a highlight reel) that shone with light — I’m navigating it completely alone.
Life in the virtual age means networks are forged in myriad ways. Friendships, relationships, and careers can be developed and maintained online, long distance, remotely. People move away but remain present in your life. Many of us have multiple friend groups that exist in parallel; we are the single common denominator among strangers who don’t know they are connected.
Yet even with remote friends, the bonds are strong; these are people who have space in our hearts and our heads even as they exist mainly in our phones and our laptops. They are undeniably real connections (we have the receipts!) but can also feel oddly intangible.
What’s in a number?
Let’s consider Dunbar’s number for a moment. Named for Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, it is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom each of us can maintain stable social relationships, in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.
Dunbar says that personal social networks will vary between 100 to 250, and of those, five will be best friends, with good friends forming the next layer and numbering around 50. Beyond that, there are friends and then acquaintances.
For all its benefits, the digital age has perhaps given us a false notion of friendship, about how many friendships we can meaningfully maintain and what is required to do so.
My person didn’t meet my friends or family. I never met his. But I know lots about them. There is not one photograph of us together. My friends would console me if I confided, but they also wouldn’t understand. To them, he would be a face on a screen. To me, he was so much more.
So, I sit alone with my thoughts, disconnected from the people and life around me. Ironic, I know, in this world of online support that I’m adept at navigating. But what would Google return on the query “I’m grieving for somebody only I knew”?
I forensically pieced together his final weeks, trying to make sense of things, to sleuth myself toward some pretense of control. I clicked from post to post, between websites and Facebook comments, as a digital voyeur into the life of somebody who used to know my whole heart. I have nobody to tell, nobody to talk to. I am a stranger to the people he was surrounded by in his final couple of years. They don’t know what he meant to me. And that’s where the guilt comes in. Could I have saved him? Should I have tried harder? I know physical proximity does play a part in creating a support network — we were rarely in the same city, and he worked all over Scotland and was, for a time, in Australia — but I was always at the end of a phone. I hope he knew that.
And the denial stage of grief? When you can see somebody’s posts from a few weeks (or in some cases, hours) before their death, when you can scroll through hundreds of messages and pictures and hear their voice in videos — how can they be gone? When you seldom saw them in person, where is the closure when even a virtual hug is no longer possible?
I had to read his death notice multiple times before it properly sank in. Are there two people in that part of the country with that name? No, there are not. He was unique.
Rereading our messages, our confessions, tracing our game of “use it in a sentence” as we created wildly outrageous stories with the sole purpose of incorporating whatever highbrow word we’d chosen that day, still makes me laugh, sob, and reminisce. They are real; they trace the forming of a relationship, a bond. But they are also fragile, ethereal; they live literally in the cloud.
A few weeks after he passed, his Facebook profile disappeared, and it felt like losing him a second time. At some point, I will need to archive what I still have of our friendship to protect it from deletion. I wish that I could have protected him in the same way.
Written in memory of Gav.
