A man holding on to what he can....through Farmville

    Over the past three weeks one of my old friends from the Army that I had not heard from in close to twenty years reached out to me on Facebook. We started trading messages and over the course of time he told me about how his wife had been killed in a car accident caused by the bad weather in February.

    We share things with other people for all kinds of reasons. sometimes it is egotistical, to show what we think is our superiority, and sometimes we do it when we are searching for someone to commisserate our troubles with. In his case, he was searching for someone to share his burden with.

   I did what friends do, I read his words and I responded as supportively as I could. I don't want to go into too much personal detail, but I realized as I was reading that his sense of loss was profound in a way I could not imagine.

  He and his wife worked many miles apart in different industries, but they both worked at a Computer. He told me how they had regularly communicated during the day via Facebook. Since her death, it had been difficult for him at work, because he missed her regular messages.
   But he couldn't stay off Facebook, because he felt an obligation to take care of her cyber farm on Farmville. It had been an ongoing competition between them, to get the craziest and wildest things on their Cyber farms. He asked me if I thought it was stupid that he do this, go to her farm each day and feed her animals, and harvest her crops. Farmville let people get puppies this week, and he got one to keep her avatar company while he is working. He thought she would like that.

   I don't think he is stupid. I think he loved her so much that he is holding on to whatever he can to keep her in his life.

   My point in writing this is that sometimes I have made fun of people who spend way too much time online, and I tell them to get out and get a life. Yet here I find someone who goes online during the day to try and hang on to one that is gone. Who the hell am I to judge?