Facebook is good for finding friends, but tells you when you’ve lost them too

My mum was once looking at an old class photo of hers from post-wartime England when she said something that’s always stuck with me.

She said: “I wonder how many of them are still alive?”

I now think she was lucky in her ignorance.

How wonderful to wonder; how terrible to know, to count them slip away.

I thought of this last week when I found myself in floods of tears at the imminent death of an old school chum, taken off life support and moved to a hospice.

Save the sympathies though, because I hadn’t seen him for at least 25 years, more even, for we last hung out in high school. I’d “seen” him on Facebook of course, but Facebook and I drifted apart two years ago, then broke up, and I hadn’t even known this boy from my youth was sick.

It was only when another friend sent me a screenshot of the news that I felt the pain of it and started to cry. I sobbed stupidly, disproportionately, weeping for someone I haven’t seen this century until I was as crumpled and soggy as the tissues scattered around me.

Now I’m left wondering why. Sure, I cried for him, his family, his friends, his poor wife updating Facebook even while she counted his departing breaths, but mostly I think I was crying for all the pain that is yet to come to every single one of us. I cried for the inevitable goodbyes we’re going to have to say to friends, parents, siblings, sometimes even to our children.

I’ve said a few goodbyes myself, though nothing yet that breaks a person to leave a hole that never fills, but I feel my future losses biding their time, sucker-punch ready.

And this is why I’m glad I don’t see the day-to-day doings of people I used to know any more; this is why I’m glad I stepped away from social media, from keeping up to speed with every passing ship.

We have evolved to embrace a core of loved ones and it is these we are emotionally equipped to tend closely, to fret over. But on Facebook, people I would have left in the past became part of my present: my core group numbered an impossible 500 people. It’s not natural.

It’s not doable. I am – we are – not robust enough to mourn the passing of everyone we ever knew. It simply hurts too much.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.