Facebook told me I had a friend request today. You know how it works: you scroll down and see a bunch of random people who know friends of yours. The last time I accepted a friend request from a friend-of-a-friend I recieved a lightning fast message about some Multi-level marketing bullshit thing. It was too fast in coming for it to have been anything but a programmed message, a bot. Really? Does that work for you? Are you getting loads of responses to your creepy af message? I didn’t work in my case. I’ll unfriend in a few weeks, I guess.
Amongst the randoms was one that wasn’t so random. A guy who used to work for me, a friend, I guess. He was French, so we bonded over that and over food. A mutual love of food, although I don’t know if he ever forgave me for being a vegetarian.
I had seen his request a few months ago but I didn’t respond at the time. I don’t venture over to Facebook very often and I have a bit of a love-hate thing going on with it. It can be a cess-pool, sure, but I’ve got thousands of followers over there, people who love Paris as much as I do, so I’ve found as long as I limit my exposure to the cess part of the pool I’m okay. I’ve developed the ability to see a post about something I disagreed with and keep scrolling. It’s life-changing shit, believe me.
So today I posted a pretty picture, responded to a bunch of sweet comments about how lovely Paris is and looked at a few other Paris-themed pages. It’s a sickness for which there is no cure, I fear. And there was his request. Eric wants to be my friend…and I can’t respond now, because I have just found out that he is dead. At 48, his heart gave out. That’s the same age as me. I wonder what we would have talked about had I accepted his request months ago when I first saw it. I’ll never know. RIP Eric.
That burning question, ‘if you had the chance to do things differently would you?” Timing. We farewelled our Professor that had pancreatic cancer on the weekend – he was given a week so had a gathering of friends to say gdbye – it was a lovely day in a sad way – just life, some beginning and some ending. Hope all good with yr writing.
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Oh that’s so sad Deb. I’m sorry to hear that. He sounded like an incredible man.
I’m sorry for your loss. Losing “what might have been” has a different sting to it than losing what was had.
So true. He was a decent guy but I didn’t accept his request because it felt…I don’t know, weird maybe, because he used to work for me. I feel for his family. He’s the second of our former staff to die young in a year. A lot of people around here live really hard lives. It’s sad.