About 6 months ago I stumbled across a “gone but not forgotten” page on Facebook for the school I attended. That was a very sad, somber evening scrolling through all those names 
A month or so ago, I got a phone call from a woman I hadn’t seen for over 50 years. She was the wife of a former colleague of mine. I think she called because she was reminiscing and had some unfinished business that I could perhaps help clear up. She reminded me that the first time we had met, she had asked me about a HS classmate of mine who had the same last time and I had replied that I didn’t like him very well. I didn’t remember the conversation, but it was certainly true that I didn’t like him. We say next to each other in home room for four years and I found him cold and unfriendly. So she went on to tell me about him. She had dated him for about four months and finally broke up because he was sometimes nasty, criticizing her in public, that sort of thing. She then went on to tell me that he had gotten a PhD in a biological science, gotten married, had a child and then started having psychotic episodes. Finally, his wife had gotten him committed for observation. But he had smuggled somehow a cyanide pill into the facility and crunched it and died. At age 32. Bizarre. In the meantime, her husband (a somewhat famous mathematician) and her daughter had died within three weeks of each other in 2013 (both of cancer, esophageal and breast, resp.), which is why I think she was sorting out her life and called me.
I’m so glad I don’t have a personal Facebook page, have never attended a high school reunion or had the faintest interest in meeting up with anyone from my past. From this thread, it’s obvious nothing good can come of it.
Did you find out any more? That sort of scenario sounds like assisted death, which it may have been for someone in senile dementia or Alzheimers, if you know what I mean.
The newspaper story I saw said that the mother was wheelchair-bound due to having lost both legs to diabetes. From what little I remember about the family, it was a real train wreck.
Bumping a zombie thread of mine: I also knew a man back in the day who I couldn’t find online either, although that wasn’t surprising because he had a name that ranked up there with The The as something that could prompt a Society For The Preventon Of Cruelty To Google Users. Anyway, within the past hour, I did “locate” him.
And this is what happened.
A couple years after I knew him, after he had graduated from college and moved back to his own area, he was arrested for and convicted of murdering a man who was dating a woman he was interested in, and said woman, and raping her after her death! IDK how much time he served, but at some point after he was let out, he did get married (and divorced) and at the time of his death a few years ago, in his 50s, he was working for a concrete-pouring company; no way would he have gotten his professional license back with something like THAT on his record.
He seemed like a decent person, too. What a waste.
I had a friend in high school, and also knew his sister. At (I think) the 20th high school reunion I saw his sister, and asked her how he was. “Oh… oh… uh… well, he killed himself. But he was doing really well up to that.”
My own HS class is having their unofficial 40th reunion tonight. I’m 3 hours away, and honestly, I probably wouldn’t go even if I was in town. I hope the ones who attend have a good time, however.
I was tracked down via classmates .com by a former boyfriend about 20 years ago. We exchanged emails on and off over the years, and I learned that I’d dodged a bullet with him. When we’d met (almost 50 years ago now) I thought he was The One, but in retrospect, I think I was just in love with the idea of being in love.
When we reconnected, he was on marriage #3. He had 5 kids by the various wives and several grandkids, but 2 or 3 of his kids didn’t talk to him. His third wife had cancer and died shortly thereafter, and I was shocked when he married #4 a couple of weeks later. That pretty much killed his relationship with the son he had by #3. And within a few months, he was telling me how #4 was a huge mistake and he was in the process of divorcing her! I tried to be as neutral as possible, all the while so glad he’d dumped me way back when.
We’d email sporadically over the next few years, and I know he was seeming someone, but last year, he suddenly quit responding. He has a very common name, and tho I googled his local paper to see if there was an obit, I didn’t find anything. At this point, it’s just morbid curiosity. I don’t need the drama of reconnecting.
I STILL haven’t found an obit for that woman, so maybe I’m not supposed to know.
It’s odd, but the only person about my age I’ve ever known who is yet dead was an Army friend who drove his motorcycle into a truck.
I am 49, so if you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that Jake is the only person I knew around my age who’s dead. Obviously 49 isn’t that old, and one would expect most people to make it past 49, but it’s rather amazing I don’t have ONE elementary school or high school friend who has had misfortune befall them.
Anyway, I had just reconnected with Jake and been out with him and his fiancee when he crashed his bike. It was a shock.
This isn’t about someone I know, but rather about somebody who was apparently a fairly prominent public figure in some circles at one time.
A while back, I got a book at a book fair about a married couple, both physicians (at a time when women doctors were uncommon) who had founded a humanitarian organization to combat extreme poverty, and bring medical care to people in those communities. Both Google and newspapers.com said that within a couple years of that book’s publication (early 1970s) one of their children died in an accident, they divorced (and he remarried, and is still alive in his 90s) and at this point her trail goes absolutely cold. The organization they founded still exists, under a different name, and I did “contact us” and asked about this, assuming they are at liberty to say.
Can you share the name of the book?
This is the book.
A previous book, which I also hope to read someday, was apparently a decent seller, enough to get the couple profiled in Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping.
This is the current iteration of that organization, after a couple of mergers and a name change.
On a slightly related note, I got some 1960s Reader’s Digests at an estate sale, and read some of them while in the process of listing them in my Amazon store. (They sell surprisingly well) There was one story about the then-nascent science of artificial joints, and again got a cold trail on the doctor after about 1970 - until I found his findagrave.com site. He had died some time after 2000, and it said that his ashes were deposited in the county grave, because they were unclaimed, and literally nothing in between.
There was also a First Person story that caught my attention, because it had a title along the lines of “My Husband Bought Me For $40 And A Chicken.” IIRC, they met in the Peace Corps, which was a big thing back then, and the $40 and a chicken was part of the culture’s wedding rituals. Anyway, I did a bit of Googling and located her; as of that time, they were still married, too. There was an e-mail address, and I did send her a message but never heard back.
In the late '90s I was in a community group with a woman who I really enjoyed dealing with. We both talked to each other enough that we had each other’s phone numbers memorized. I was then posted out of town for eight years and then posted back. I discovered that she had died of cancer about a year or two before my return.
In my current job I had a co-worker who I worked with on a project several years ago. She was moved to a different project a couple of years before Covid I didn’t hear from her for a couple of years until a mutual co-worker told me that she was really sick with cancer and not doing well at all. As of Feb 2022 she was still alive but I haven’t heard from her since then.
Mystery solved, regarding the woman doctor whose trail went ice-cold in 1974.
I found their son on Facebook and messaged him. Within a couple hours, he messaged me back, gave me a thumbs-up, and said that his mother lived and worked in the Atlanta, GA area until her sudden death in 1995. In the 1980s, she married another doctor named “Johnson” and he said they were buried together.
I had feared that she too had died in the 1970s (not unusual for people who have experienced the death of a child) but was relieved to know she hadn’t.
I should add that I never heard back from Global Communities. Truthfully, I really didn’t expect to.
When I was in Junior High in the early 1970s, we had a Social Studies teacher that we guys were crazy about. She was just out of college, and really pretty. I have no idea how long she taught, but I never saw her again after my two years there.
A while back, I wondered, whatever happened to Miss Madeline? So, I started looking, and in my research she had gone thru a lot in her life.
Mother died when she was in high school.
Got married right after graduating high school.
Divorced and remarried after graduating college.
Divorced again and remarried, this time for the rest of her short life, as she died of cancer at the age of 38 in the early 1980s.
She was an only child, and I’m sure her farmer dad, who outlived her by quite a few years, was quite proud of his little girl
Since this thread is still alive, I updated the title to make it more descriptive.