This morning I was thinking of which nice picture to use to send him birthday greetings when I decided to check his Facebook page only to learn that he had passed away!
This is the risk you run when the friendship is long distance and you do not have a common friend to know and tell you. So sad.
I have so many friends overseas who started out as partners or customers. Jim was my earliest foreign partner. He helped me write my user manual for a program (these days we call it app) in the late 80s. I wrote one of the earliest PIM (personal info manager) for Windows. That was Windows 2 and the development environment then was primitive and buggy.
Over they years I have lost quite a few foreign friends to death. Seems like I had a knack for striking up such friendships with people much older than me. But Jim and I failed to stay in touch because we started on Compuserve and then went on to different things. Had it been the internet age already we would have stayed in touch more regularly.
I lost Lloyd Jenkins first, almost a decade now. I didn't actually know when he was gone but he told me he was going to the nursing home soon as his Alzheimer's become more advanced. Then shortly after he was unreachable. It was sad to read his email as they gradually get more confused and finally quite incoherent. In the last few years Glenna passed away from kidney failure and her husband told me about that. Recently it was Anne N. which I got to know from her daughter. She had written to me of her impending surgery and told me she might not survive. The operation was a success but her body was too weak to make a recovery. Glad she was well enough for a while to say goodbyes to family.
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