One of my childhood friends sent me a friend request on Facebook a few years ago. I use Facebook infrequently and never send out friend requests of my own, but I accepted his request and promptly forgot about it.
He had been my closest friend in junior high until his family moved away. We quickly lost touch, though our mothers didn’t. As I grew into adulthood, I’d occasionally hear updates through my mother on what was going on in his life.
A few times after making the connection online, I’d feel a slight twinge of guilt that I hadn’t reached back out to him. Still, a combination of laziness, aversion to social media, and mild introversion kept me from doing so. I’m good at responding to online conversations, but not so good at initiating them.
Roughly a year after the Facebook connection, my mother let me know that he’d had a heart attack and was in a coma. A week later, he was gone. My mild guilt over not sending him a message grew exponentially.
Months after his passing, I open Facebook Messenger for some reason, and there sits an unread message from my friend. The date is shortly after his initial friend request, almost exactly a year before his death. He’d sent me a message which I hadn’t seen, with a quick reminiscence of our junior high years. I’d missed the message, he likely thought I was actively ignoring him, and I would never get the chance to correct that assumption.
