Reviving a zombie thread: About a year after this post, in late 2014, a then-relatively unknown Senator named Bernie Sanders spoke in the city where I now live, in a small auditorium that held a couple hundred people, and all the seats were taken and people were standing against the back wall; the room never did go over capacity, so nobody was turned away. Good presentation…and on the other side of the room was a man who I strongly suspect may have been this ex-boyfriend. :eek: I didn’t approach him to find out. I also looked him up afterwards on http://www.veromi.com and discovered that he probably does not live in this area, so it probably wasn’t him, but yeah, that was a weird experience.
Just wanted to say that some threads are worth zombifying. These are intriguing stories.
Also wanted to say that life’s more interesting if you don’t read the ends of sentences.
I completely forgot to mention in the OP that at the time I met him, this man was in medical school. You’d think that a physician, or someone capable of becoming one if for whatever reason he didn’t finish, would have SOME online presence, KWIM?
A more recent sleuthing revealed that he had incorporated his medical practice less than a week before his death, and he was actually 30, not 31, because he died a couple months before his birthday. It appeared that he never married or had children, and I still don’t know why he died. He lived in, and set up his practice in, the city where he did his residency, and was buried in our hometown.
His gravestone, which is pictured on the http://www.findagrave.com website, says
Dr. (his name)
1961-1992
BELOVED SON
When I went to college I was the country kid away from home and my assigned roommate really intimidated me. He drove a new vehicle and had a $800 stereo that he had paid for with his part-time entrepreneurial business - as a 19 year old! He turned out to be an OK roommate. Our second year he wasn’t around and I heard he took time off to change directions in life; his dad was a doctor - I thought of something in that line.
A month ago I made a business contact with a person with the same uncommon last name in the same city my roommate was from. The person had never heard of my roommate so I did some digging. It turned out that the guy I’d known had eventually returned to college and gotten an MBA. He had been killed at age 31 when his bike was hit by a 16 year old on the first day after the the 16 year old had got their driver’s license.
Crap.
What kind of business did your roommate do, or do you remember?
Terrible about him, and the person who hit him too.
I have another one.
Around the same time that I met the guy mentioned in the OP, I was working in a restaurant and one of the people I became friendly with was a college student who was just a year or two out of high school. Our school’s “People Who Left Us Too Soon” sub-forum on Facebook mentioned her; she had a unique first name, and again, a bit of sleuthing revealed that she had died in the early 1990s, when she was in her mid-20s. The Facebook page did not mention that she was married or that she lived in another part of the country, which did make the search a bit harder.
The story gets even worse.
She was 8 months pregnant at the time. :eek: She was driving home from work and her vehicle was hit by a truck that didn’t see her car; it didn’t sound like she was DOA but her baby was delivered later that day by what sounded like a post-mortem cesarean section, and she lived 4 days. 
They were buried in the same grave together.
Her poor husband - being widowed and losing his first child, at the age of 22.
When I was 16 this girl who lived across the street befriended me and we hung out. Rather, she attached herself to me, was super clingy, and eventually slept with my boyfriend. (She had a thing about long-haired drummers and I was dating a long-haired drummer, totally saw it coming.) Anyway, she was (to put it very politely) not a healthy friend to have and I stopped hanging around her.
She ended up getting together with a guy I knew to say hi and having 2 kids with him. I’m talking 20+ years ago. Long story short, I thought about her once in a while but never saw her again until a couple years ago when she was in the same store as me. She looked awful, like she was “on” something, very twitchy and tweaky, and I only saw her long enough to think “Oh my God that’s <girl’s name>” and then she left.
This weekend I was sitting on a friend’s patio chatting with another friend who had dated the brother of the guy that <girl’s name> was with. Of course I asked how the brother was and she said not good, “…ever since his wife died…” I was like, “What? Was her name…” and we both said <girl’s name> at the same time. Turns out she became a serious drug addict, had diabetes and never looked after herself so she lost a leg (maybe both, I didn’t want to pry) and passed away in November 2014, which was probably shortly after I saw her.
You know:
- That you are officially Old
- and -
- Should NOT feed google any “used to know” names
- when -
If you do manage to find a live one and start chatting, as soon as you ask “What happened to…”, you will get "He/She died of cancer/heart attack/stroke.
(you are likely “old” if you understand the difference between “heart attack” and “stroke”. Until age 40 or so, my response was “often-fatal things which happen to* “old people”*…”)
He did interior painting which he estimated at $25/hour and went home most weekends to work 20+ hours every Friday-Sunday. He got started in his father’s friends high-end homes and developed a name for showing up as promised and doing good work. He set up jobs using client-signed work orders for a fixed price and understood paint chemistry, various brushes, and prep process. At that time a typical student job was 10-15 hours @ $5/hour.
I remember a kid from elementary school. He was a couple of grades ahead of me, and he used to bring a very distinctive looking toy to school. The kid also had very distinctive features. But I never knew his name, and year later, when I would attempt to ask other older schoolmates about him, they couldn’t recall him. [Note: I went to school in a small town with pretty much the same schoolmates from first thru 12th grade.]
Then, a couple of years ago, a schoolmate posted a picture of his first grade class on facebook. I remembered a lot of the names, but not all, but as I was looking at it. . . I saw this mystery kid’s face in it. The poster had identified all the kids, so I went looking to see any info on him. Turns out he had died in the early 1990s. I think his parents had taken him out of public schools and ended up sending him to boarding schools after 1970.
My ex-girlfriend died about a year ago. I hadn’t been in touch with her since shortly after we broke up in 2003, but I was FB friends with a friend of hers, who mentioned it.
Once again, bumping a zombie to take things in a slightly different direction.
A while back, I bought some old magazines at an estate sale, and have been reading them before listing them online. A Reader’s Digest from the late 1960s had an article about certain medical advances, and one surgeon had a name distinctive enough that I figured he wouldn’t be hard to find on Google. I was right; however, there was almost nothing about him on Google, except for this advance (the first wave of knee replacements) and an entry on Findagrave.com. This is the sad part: He had died in 2011, and his ashes were buried in a mass grave by the county because nobody claimed them. :eek: However, his medical license was active until the early 1990s.
That’s kind of sad
A little googling on my name (which I do on occasion) seems to show that I am dead.
And for something a bit different…
A friend of a friend had this awful boyfriend, a year older than us, from ninth grade on. Let’s call him Marshal. None of us could stand Marshal, except his girlfriend, Chloe, of course. He didn’t like us either, and was as big a jerk to us as is possible without getting suspended. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Marshal graduated when we were juniors, and he and Chloe broke up.
Now, I moved away the day after graduation the following year, so I never saw Marshal again. But multiple people - at least four - told me that he killed himself three years after he got out of high school (so around 1997). I wasn’t too broken up about this news.
Imagine my surprise when he popped up on LinkedIn a couple of years ago. He has a picture in his profile, and it’s definitely the same Marshal. God only know how the rumor he killed himself got started or why.
Maybe those people mistook him for someone with the same name? That happened to a “friend” (long story) although in this case, she had the same uncommon first name as someone who had died (although it wasn’t spelled the same way), and the guy who heard that Uncommon First Name had died knew both of them slightly, but not their last names, and pictured the wrong one when he heard about UCF dying in a car accident. Imagine his surprise when he saw UCF out shopping one day. :eek: ETA: They looked NOTHING alike.
In the spirit of the thread…
When I did my undergrad work, I had a good friend who happened to be a woman. There was never anything romantic between us; we were simply friends. Something clicked, and we got along quite well, though we agreed that we never wanted to go further. Maybe we were worried about ruining a good thing.
Graduation came and went, and though she moved away from our city, we stayed in touch. More than once, I crashed on her couch, when I was in her city. She always got in touch when she was back in town, visiting family; and we’d meet up. We always kept up a written correspondence.
But time passes, and we eventually fell out of touch.
Some years ago, I got curious, and did a Google search. I found her obituary, which stated that she had died at age 40, from leukemia.
I always had a crush on this one guy in college, and he even kissed me once but I was seeing someone else and didn’t go further with him. I always looked for him in the alumni magazine and even saw him in a picture once. He had a bald head but since that’s in style I didn’t think twice about it.
I finally got around to Googling him and he had died from cancer in 2009 at age 39. And there is a resolution in the state senate mourning his death!
Reviving a zombie thread…
I lost touch with my best high school friend. I’ll call him John. 17 years later, I tracked him down. I knew he moved to a different state and had a girlfriend, but it took me a few months to find a current phone number.
I call. His girlfriend answers. When I ask to speak to John, she pauses for a long time, and asks me to hold on. John’s brother answered the phone (which I thought was weird, because I knew he lived in yet another state 
), and verifies who I am.
I turns out that, after not speaking to John for years, that I called less than two hours after he died.
Wow, Junkman. What an awful story.
In the early 1990s, I wrote for a music zine (anyone remember those?). The zine’s editor seems to have no online presence herself, other than her address, and I’m not going to pursue it further because she may have some very good reasons for it. One of them may be that a few of the zine writers were, to put it mildly, strange, as one could probably expect.
I Googled another zine writer and wasn’t surprised to find out that she was deceased, based on her age (yes, Virginia, this zine had some middle-aged writers, and she was one of them). What was so shocking to me is that she had been MURDERED by her daughter, who served less than a year behind bars for this!