There was also a boy I knew slightly in high school; he married his pregnant girlfriend immediately after graduation, and several years later, I saw in the newspaper that they had divorced. Less than a week later, his obituary appeared, stating that he’d died in a car crash in a distant state. It was determined to be an accident, but I’ve always believed that he committed suicide.
I remember once running into Nick, someone I knew from some Repertory Theatre plays we did. One particular play was written and directed by my friend Dion, where Nick starred alongside an older veteran actor, Colin. I hadn’t seen Nick since that play, a couple of years previously, and he asked me how everything was going. This was the only news I had: “Oh, you remember Dion? Well, he died. Oh, and you remember Colin? He died too.”
Meanwhile I’ve been trying to find a friend I knew from when I was very young, but I’m not on Facebook, and have had no luck tracking him down, even though he was the kind of nerdy kid who would have taken to the Internet quite comfortably. I fear he may have died many years ago.
I realize now that I’ve conflated two different memories. My parents sent me a newspaper article, I don’t even remember what it was about but presumably about Thailand, and on the back of that just happened to be my third-grade teacher’s obituary.
My former fling’s obituary I saw years earlier by chance in the local newspaper when I was there for a visit after the first time I lived in Thailand.
If you’re wondering if an American died, whether citizen or legal resident, check out http://www.familysearch.org. It’s the main genealogy site run by the Mormons, but since they added census information and other records, it can be a real mess if the person has a common name.
You can also look at the Social Security Death Index, but its accessibility varies.
Reviving an old thread: Not long ago, one of my Facebook friends, one of my closest friends when we were in our early teens, messaged me and asked about a girl from our social circle. She said she hadn’t thought of her in many years and wondered if I knew anything about her. I replied that I did, and that the news wasn’t good. She died in the late 1990s from a brain tumor. My friend had no idea, even though they still lived in the same area.
A few years ago my wife wondered aloud what was up with my ex-wife. Two minutes later we were reading her second husband’s obituary.
Some time after that my wife once again was wondering aloud, this time about an ex-girlfriend that I’d mentioned from time to time. Knowing what had happened the last time, I was bracing for bad news, but instead we got a rather different surprise: she was now living as a man and was blogging about her upcoming sex-reassignment surgery.
I have a gay friend that I’ve known since early 1970’s. From what he’s told me about his drugging and sexing preferences, I am shocked that he DIDN’T die even way back then.
I lost contact with him for many years, and his only on-line traces (that I could find) were old, but I recently reconnected (with some heroic searching efforts on my part). He has full-blown AIDS (controlled with meds), and claims he had it even way back then.
Wasn’t AIDS a 100% death penalty back in the 1970’s, before the current medical treatments were available? How is this guy still alive? He claims to have gotten the disease, apparently, during that period when it was going around and people were starting to die of it, but before anyone had even discovered what was killing all the gays and Haitians, let alone any treatment for it.
There was a sickish joke going around in the 1980’s, that was timely at the time, yet I thought it was clever:
What is the hardest thing about having AIDS? (Spoilered because probably offensive to lots of parties.)
Convincing your mother and father that you’re Haitian.
Some PWAs have lived a very long time, even prior to relatively safe and effective meds coming out (no pun intended). We’re all biologically different.
And it’s been discovered that some HIV-positive people do not get AIDS. It’s believed to be related to the gene that protected some people from bubonic plague.
OK someone has to come in with a happier story.
I lost track of the first girl I said I love you to. Summer after high school we were still dating but she was moving away with her family. In retrospect I didn’t know how to handle it. So I pulled away and didn’t call. She called me up and yelled at me for being insensitive (guilty) and I never heard from her again. I felt awful. We were great friends long before we started dating. I missed her. In college my best friend was there with me and he told me he heard from her. She had joined the Navy and was doing well. I got the address and wrote to her. No response.
So fast forward 20 something years. I had seen her name on classmates.com. I left her a message. No reply for a long time. Obviously classmates wasn’t very active even then. Out of the blue I get a message from her and a phone #. I call. I apologize. I grovel. I hope she can forgive me.
She had no idea what I was talking about.
No, its more complicated than that. All she remembered was that we kinda dated and she lost track. When I reminded her that we had deep feelings for each other and were intimate the memories came flooding back. What happened was she had severe abuse issues with her father. Right after the last time we talked he beat her severely. She told me there were problems with him but never how severe. She never let me meet her family. After the beating she left and didn’t look back. Joined the Navy. Got married. Got out of the Navy. Has a very nice career, husband and family. Part of dealing with the trauma of that time was to bury her memories and feelings from that time. Which included me.
Since those feelings from then were not exactly pleasant and her fresh remembrance of her feelings for me were not healthy for her current relationship we decided to not stay in close contact. Which was fine by me. I no longer had those feelings but I was thrilled to find out she had a good and happy life. We remain Facebook friends but she posts even less than I do. We live in different states so its not hard to keep separate.
So about as good as could be expected.
I’ve learned not to look up people from the past.
Searched for and found my first girlfriend, the mad love of my 15yo life… and after years of drug and alcohol abuse, she didn’t remember me. At all. The sad thing is that her father wouldn’t let her see me (and I would classify myself at that age as a Nice Guy and pretty safe)… so her football-jock brother’s best friend got the nod and knocked her up at 15, which was probably the start of her decline.
So I looked up her friend, who had been my best friend’s smart and sexy GF, and found her running a small resort in Mexico… a hard-edged butch who was sick of being mistreated by men and had given up on the US. At least she remembered me. The sting came when I very hesitantly brought up a steamy moment from our early 20s and asked, “That time in the kitchen…?” “Uh-huh?” “Should I have stayed?” “Uh-huh.” Dammit.
Much later I looked up a woman I loved madly in the years before my current marriage - in part because I couldn’t figure out why she was absolutely invisible on the net. Turns out the IVF child she was pregnant with the last time I saw her - she had gone back to her chronically ill and impotent husband out of devotion - was born severely autistic, which pretty much meant the end of her career and outside life. (There’s a horrid, horrid irony in there but it would take far too long to explain… suffice it to say that if I hadn’t been who I was to her, she would have found far better services for her son and would be a free-er woman today.)
So I don’t do dat no mo’.
I have an ex-boyfriend that I’ve been a bit curious about, but he doesn’t seem to be findable on the WWW either, although I did locate him on Classmates.com when that was the king of social media. If he was dead, there are few enough degrees of separation that I’m sure I would know about it. Anyway, I really don’t want to know what he’s up to THAT badly. I’m afraid I’d find out something that I didn’t want to know - one of those things.
In short, he’d be an OK husband with the right woman, but an atrocious father, and THAT’S what I wouldn’t want to know about him. 
Four friends of mine were dead within 5 yrs of us graduating high school. Two drunk driving (motorcycle) accidents, one drug related, and one murder. Another was elected to city council by that time. We were all “close” in school, hardly ever saw each other afterwards.
While in college in the late 1980s/early 1990s I co-oped at a company in Maryland and lived with one of the technicians who worked in our lab. He had a real nice condo in Gaithersburg. He was a normal, everyday guy, and quite intelligent. He was a master at assembling microwave satellite communication uplinks and downlinks. He taught me a lot of good stuff.
I recently googled his name. He moved to California ten years ago, got divorced, and is now homeless. He has a long laundry list of criminal convictions, mostly public alcohol consumption and indecent exposure. His latest infraction has a $9,000 bail. I don’t (yet) know what the charges are.
It just shocks the hell out me that he is in this condition. I feel real bad for him. He was a good guy. 
Two of my best high school friends died of AIDS within 10 years of our graduation. One had been disowned by his family. He and one of our classmates attended the same university. She took him under her wing and her family “adopted” him. They weren’t really friends when we were in high school, though, which I found quite ironic at the time.
Another classmate died of ALS two years ago. I’d dated his brother. Apparently it runs in the family because their father died of it a few years beforehand.
Still doesn’t explain why he passed on the date.
I’m surprised it took me almost thirty years to google the woman I almost married back in the 80s.
Yikes! She had a rough life, and it’s been over for twenty years (cancer). I feel terrible – I was friends with some of her family, but it’s a little late for condolences now…
I got out of bed this morning and really felt like shit. Back hurt, dizzy, feet sore.
Looked on the Internet and found out I’ve been dead for 2 years!
I’ve posted this before.
I had had a falling-out with my best friend from grade school and high school. We were the classic cute girl with homelier girlfriend, with the homelier one being me. After high school, we were both dating and I found out she had been seeing my boyfriend behind my back. This really pissed me off, seeing that she already had her own boyfriend and her pick of many others due to her good looks.
I cut her off when I met another guy I liked, mainly because I didn’t want her flirting with this one too. After many, many years, the internet came into being and I heard she was trying to look me up through my sister. I was still pissed off and declined.
Fast-forward to about 2010. I was idly looking at a page which showed deaths of people from one’s high school and saw her (misspelled) name listed, and that she had died in 2007. I then joined Facebook to find common friends and confirmed the truth. And she had died of pancreatic cancer - a nasty way to go.
I wish I had gotten over my anger earlier and connected with her.
It is not always bad. My wife tracked me down 31 years after we parted at 21 & 19. We married two years later…