I didn't think that today would be the first day since I was 17 that I think about Michael.

I met (can I even use met here?) Michael when he was 13 and I was 11. If I remember correctly, I searched the public user list of MSN Messenger for people in my age from Germany, and he was the first that responded to my e-mail.

We added each other on Messenger and started talking. The usual stuff, seemed all right until he send me a picture of himself. He was wearing a white shirt and was bold. Turns out he had Leukemia and was getting treated for the past 1-2 years.

My troubles and problems seemed non-existent compared to him. He was fighting a disease that could kill him any day, and I am whining about getting mobbed. So I decided to support him. But he didn't want support. Not the way I was offering it. He did not want to talk about his disease. Instead, he asked to be treated as a friend. And so I did that.

We kept contact for the next 2 years. Nothing extra ordinary, there is something nice about having somebody to talk to about your life that has nothing to do with your meat-life. At some point he told me that he is flying to the U.S. to partake in a clinical trial that could cure him and that he will not have a stable internet connection there. He promised that he will contact me once in a while.

Indeed, a few weeks later I got an E-mail from him that he arrived safely and that his treatment is starting soon.

And then there was silence...

I didn't hear anything from him. I was worried, but I had the feeling he was doing well and he just didn't have time to talk to weird strangers on the internet because he is cured now, all is good.

About half a year after my last contact with him, I received an e-mail from him. Even though it was his e-mail address, it was his mother who sent the mail. Michael lost his battle. The therapy did not help him. He was gone.

I felt weird. I felt sad, but I didn't know how to grieve. And now I remember that feeling, and I still don't know how to grieve.

Different kind of grief, because it's tinged (in my experience) with a certain weirdness. Not a "why am I grieving?" but rather a "what exactly am I grieving for?" ... because my online friends, including the one or two who've died, were just conversations to me. People yes but represented by text. It's weird grieving for text.

And I've had semi-close online friends die but also super-close online friends vanish into the ether without a comment^. The latter is worse, because it leaves questions.

^these would be indistinguishable, I suppose, except that in the former case one receives confirmation.

EDIT: great question.

I disagree with this assertion:

Since the invention of Facebook and Twitter, the brain size factors that limit the size of our potential network size are easily circumvented.

I would argue that social media eliminates the range of our network, but it doesn't do anything for the size. There's no reason why our brains should have any more of a handle on large numbers of contacts with Facebook than it should with an address book and those have existed for hundreds of years. Keeping contact with people beyond our immediate social network is what weddings, christmas cards, funerals and all the other social rituals we've developed since anthropology was possible. They're a lot easier to interact with in the digital era, sure, but our brains are no better or worse at bouncing amongst 900 people now than they were in the neolithic era. Just because you have a thousand Facebook friends does not mean that you, right now, have a viable social relationship with 1000 people.

The other problem with mourning people we don't know is that our representations of them are only partially "them." Everyone reading my writing has an idea of who I am, but it's formed from the off-handed observations of an extremely-limited contextual dataset. I'll guess that roughly a third of the people reading this would have believed that I can use the phrase "contextual dataset" in conversation, in person, but I can and do - so now you have a datapoint. You do not know that I tend to flick my bracelet around my wrist as I think or that I talk with my hands a lot. You certainly don't know how I hold your gaze as you speak.

Which isn't to say you don't have that impression of me - but it isn't me it's an amalgam of everyone your brain thinks might match my paradigm. Thing of it is, if we all got together in a room and chatted over a shared experience, we'd know each other because we'd have the chance to observe non-contextual cues, assess body language, listen to tone of voice and observe each other in a rich environment.

So when someone we met at a bar once dies, we feel something and we know it to be genuine. But when someone we've only interacted with via typing dies, we feel weird because from our perspective, only a tiny percentage of that person actually died. Our avatar of them - our representation - remains like a husk, haunting us... and we know that we have now lost any opportunity of reconciling truth and fiction.