Mourning Someone I Never Met

It actually hurts to write these words…

Fellow blogger Ashley L. Peterson has died. I can’t recall exactly when and how we connected, but somehow, we came to be regular readers and commenters for each other.

I admired Ashley for her well-written, well-researched posts. She had a way of looking at issues from unique angles. I wasn’t writing a mental health blog, and as someone who dealt with depression-type feelings, but not in a formally diagnosed way, Ashley’s blog covered topics that weren’t necessarily ones that I had personal experience with. And yet, I was drawn to Ashley’s engaging, authentic, accessible writing style. She never shied away from difficult taboo topics, and she wrote with openness and honesty.

As a commenter, Ashley was a supportive friend. She was the type of person who read all your posts in detail and responded with thoughtful, genuine comments to each one. My blog is a Jewish blog (that granted, mostly doesn’t meet that goal), not a mental health or mental illness blog, and yet Ashley responded to my posts that were outside of her primary areas of interest. And judging by the responses from fellow bloggers, she was capable of maintaining such friendships with so many people.

But I also valued her wicked sense of inappropriate humor. She and I both shared that same “yup, we just went there” bawdy humor. She instinctively knew when I needed my feelings validated and when I needed to joke about erotic literature fails and lighting Chanukah candles in the buff. I will miss Ashley’s humor as much as her support.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Friday Night

Because I’m not 100% Shabbat observant anymore, and because I was still online after candle-lighting, I knew about Ashley’s death Friday night before I went to Shabbat dinner. Husband and I were going to a large Shabbat dinner at the synagogue. And in a cosmic alignment type way, the same night I learned of Ashley’s death, I walked past “Joyce’s” house en route to the synagogue, and I saw that “Joyce’s house” was for sale.

As many of you already know, Ashley is, sadly, not the first friend I’ve lost to severe clinical depression.

Of course, the house wasn’t really Joyce’s and it hadn’t been for a long time. I gave the house key that Joyce had given me back to “Ezra” days after her suicide because I was no longer comfortable keeping it; it was no longer appropriate. Also, the exterior of the house looked renovated. Not a “knock the house down and rebuild a new one”, but still, significant differences visible even at night. It wasn’t the same house. But it brought up strange feelings.

There aren’t many similarities between Ashley, a blog friend who knew so much about me, and yet whom I’d never met, and Joyce, a friend whose house I visited all the time, whose food I ate and clothing I wore – except that they died of the same cause. The biggest similarity was perhaps the feeling that I couldn’t talk about either’s death with offline (I hate the term IRL) friends and acquaintances. How could I possibly explain to synagogue friends that I was feeling down because I’d just learned that a fellow blogger, whom I knew through my anonymous blog and never met, (and oh by the way, I have an anonymous blog), had died by suicide?

I couldn’t. So just like I did the day of Joyce’s suicide on the same day as my sister’s wedding, I compartmentalized. I had to. I drank a lot of wine at Shabbat dinner. And honestly, I had a genuinely good time at the Shabbat dinner. Big Party Judaism Extrovert that I am, I’ve been looking forward to large Shabbat dinners like this forever, and I enjoyed it. What else could I do?

Blogging and Friends

When does blogging transition to friendship? Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

When does a blogger become a friend? Even setting aside the constraints of geography, most of us wouldn’t become friends had we met in offline life. We’d write off friendship due to age difference or some other demographic. In my case, I refuse on principle to befriend anyone younger than me or within 10 years of my age who is a parent of small children (yes, I am a bitch). But mostly, it’s because in offline life, it’s difficult to strip away the outer differences that act as a boundary towards connecting on a real level.

Blogging strips away a lot of that.

Ashley never knew my name, what I look like, or where I live, and yet she knew all about my significantly flawed marriage and how when I’m feeling really depressed, I can’t bring myself to shower.

But there’s a lot that we don’t know still. I thought I knew Ashley – guinea pigs, past travels and nursing career, psychomotor retardation, soft atheism, past suicide attempts and hospitalizations, penchant for language, sense of humor. But there was a lot that I didn’t know. I didn’t know exactly how much she was struggling. I didn’t know her October 9 post about spammy blog followers would be her last. Even before I posted that I was taking a break from blogging, I couldn’t manage the time commitment nor the energy for blogging and blog-reading/commenting in between the Jewish holidays and work. Is there a like, a comment, a post, an email that had I managed to send before that time that could have convinced her to keep living? Probably not, but I’m kicking myself anyway. By the time I did email, as I’ve done in the past, it was too late. Ashley’s family confirmed what many of us in the blog world already suspected, but didn’t want to say out loud.

***

I don’t think ours deserves the label of close friendship. Still, I valued the blog-friendship we had and I am so sad that it is gone.

Wishing Ashley’s family and friends comfort and peace. ❤️