Hugging the Air
As a telecommuter who works on web content, I rarely meet my colleagues face-to-face. My work world is virtual, based on emails, attached documents, and phone calls. In most cases, this suits me fine. But the recent death of a colleague I’d met only once pointed out some limitations.
I wanted to send my condolences to those closest to her. But who were they?
Google and Yahoo searches turned up the name of her high school, some Twitter and Facebook postings, her comments about an apartment she’d rented during a vacation in Paris. The local newspapers had no obituary for her.
From postings on the private blog she’d invited me to, I knew that her parents in a nearby city had helped care for her during previous bouts with cancer and that she’d found their help problematic: needed but tinged with a sense of impending doom that she greatly resisted. I knew that she had many friends. But who had sat with her in her final hours?
In the end, it was a mutual colleague who sent me an address for her parents, by email, of course. I bought a sympathy card and wrote the note, a stranger writing to strangers about a talented and complicated person, their adult child, whose death came much too early and was far from virtual.
