I know that Facebook is challenging to many. It can be a place where anger, bigotry, cruelty, judgement, and rejection abide. It often is home base to posts that challenge our religious beliefs, politics, philosophies, and even sense of self. It requires diligence and a frequent use of filters that some find just too daunting to deal with. I know it can be all of those things and worse. But for me, Facebook is a repository of connectivity, a jukebox of family and friends–old, new, and completely digital–that I can access with a few clicks, a few keyboard strokes. I can keep in touch with friends far and near, many of whom I have known for the better part of my last 60+ years, who otherwise would be relinquished to the dusty corners of the past in my mind alone. I can keep current with family members with whom I otherwise would only exchange Christmas cards. I can meet and learn about new friends with new ideas, experiences, and interesting histories. And I can somehow make amends for the friends I never knew.

I never really knew Lincoln. I remember him only from the annual family photo Christmas card that his parents, my aunt and uncle, sent each year. I’m not even sure that we ever met face-to-face. He belonged to a part of my family tethered ever so delicately through the waning memory of a father deceased before his time. I knew he had two brothers. I knew he went to college and got married and had a family. I can conjure up a somewhat round faced, smiling, blond young man in my mind from an amalgam of photos through the years. But that is really all I ever knew about my cousin. Until he died.

I had kept in touch with my father’s family through Christmas cards, dutifully exchanged every year with his two brother’s and their families. The cards would come in the form of family photos and letters chronicling the past year’s activities–this cousin graduated, this cousin married, this cousin moved abroad. In 2015 I got the chance to actually visit with my father’s next oldest brother and his wife. The trip was scheduled for October. Excitement was running high. And then I got the word from my aunt: Lincoln had died suddenly in September at the tender age of 53, leaving a wife and two high-school-aged daughters. I felt gut-punched.

It could have been because he was actually 4 years younger than me and the age of his demise hit too close to home. It could have been that it happened in the context of planning a happy reunion with family members and the sadness caused a ripple in the familial pond. It could have been many reasons but it was not. I felt gut-punched because I lost my cousin twice.

My birth father, whose name I carried until the date of my marriage, died when I was only 2 years old. Much too soon for me to remember him, except from photos. Certainly much too soon for his death to carry much angst for me, as I was only tenuously attached to this human being having only known him in my newest experiences of life and had hardly figured out who or what a “daddy” was. The connection with his family–grandparents, father, mother, brothers and their wives and children–was already fraying from the strain of his moving across country to a place called California. I know that my grandparents dutifully traveled from Minnesota to be present for my birth and that my mother traveled alone in return, carrying his remains back to the place he grew up. Through my growing up years, Grandma and Grandpa sent birthday, Easter, and Christmas cards and letters. My mother exchanged Christmas cards with the whole family (when she remembered to do so). Mom, my sister and I took the obligatory plane ride (one of only a couple of trips) to the Midwest for my great-grandfather’s funeral and I visited my grandmother one more time when my sister was attending college close by. But my mother had remarried when I was 5, to a man who really became my daddy, and the branch of the family tree that connected me to my father’s people ceased to bear much fruit. We moved on. And any relationship with cousins that might have been nurtured by summer family trips and such withered with my father’s death.

I must confess I didn’t think much about his death nor about my cousins until I got older and life slowed down and I could really reflect on life and family and people who were gone. And then Lincoln died. And the “loss” of those familial ties, the chance to get to know my cousins and aunts and uncles and even grandparents and spend some of the times that they had together left an aching in my chest. Lincoln died before I ever got to know him. Lincoln was lost to me but even more importantly, that whole life–years of family connection–was lost to me. I grieved his passing–too young, too soon–and I grieved that he would never know that I grieved for him. He would never know what loss I felt that I never really knew him and now never would. Except through the eyes of his widow.

I felt compelled to send a sympathy card to Renée. But I also felt awkward. I suddenly desperately wanted to feel some close connection with the family, that distant family with whom I merely shared genes and a last name. I had never met her. Perhaps she never even knew I existed. Had Lincoln ever spoken of me? I surely had not spoken of him to my family. Would it seem insincere to send words of condolence to the wife of a friend I never really knew? I did so. But not so much for Renée and her family. It was for me. To help me assuage my grief by ever so gently propping up that withered limb. Thankfully she was graciously receptive and we finally became “friends.” On Facebook.

Through Facebook I felt a twinge of loss again. Reading through the posts on Renée’s page made by friends and family remembering Lincoln I realized again what I had lost from not knowing this man, this stranger, who forever in my mind was a fresh-faced preteen. He was one of those rare people who was truly “larger-than-life.” Not larger. HUGE. He positively, joyfully, lovingly, inspiring-ly touched so many lives. I wonder if he knew. But also through Facebook I got to meet my cousin again. And see him through the eyes of his family and friends who absolutely adored him. And I have made two new friends: Renée…and Lincoln.