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By Root 1003 0

the first to respond to any post. I have never met him, so I don’t know what Bill looks like in real life, but in my mind he is a bear-like man with huge hands he uses to grab your shoulders and an open face that he brings close to you when he speaks, telling you that God will help you as He helped Bill when his promising son Michael died. Lana must be small and strong, with a face perfected by weather, and she might offer to plant your child’s favorite flower in Brooke’s Garden, her form of parenting her daughter’s memory after Brooke was hit by a train. Sue and her son Wally. Pretty Shelby and her precious toddler Chase. Eloquent Carl and Wilem. Gigi and her seven-year-old Kelsey. And Christian, sorely missed by Astrid. We paid attention to each other, trying to anticipate the shards that would hurt our friends. Lana was from Massachusetts, and when I read of another train accident in North Andover, another child killed the way Brooke had been killed, I wrote. It’s what we did. There are more than a hundred names I kept in a book by my computer, their birthdays and death days marked so I would remember to send my prayers and wishes. It was simple: none of us wanted our children to be forgotten.

By the time I got to ASG, I had already found some relief at the keyboard. Wade and I had been bidding on sports cards when he died, and the auctions were still ongoing. We had a good reputation for paying promptly, and I didn’t want that to be tarnished. I felt, and still feel, a responsibility to his reputation. So I asked a friend to post on the board what had happened, promising that I would pay for whatever Wade had won and asking that the sellers be patient. They were much more than that. Understand first that this is a community in which sports cards were auctioned. Souls were not bared, confidences not shared. This was sports cards. Or so I thought. Within days of Wade’s death, the e-mails started coming in. Stratfan, from whom we had bought many cards, wrote that we had “after such a long time, become friends through this forum, and that trust and friendship will never be forgotten.” He told me, too, the story of his son, Ronnie, with whom he had collected, describing the same intimate enjoyment Wade and I had shared. And then he told me that two years before, on Father’s Day, Ronnie had drowned. He warned me that the pain would not go away, and he promised to stay in touch and did. But it wasn’t just the bereaved who reached out. SptInvstr, whose real name was Brad Drown, wrote, All of us who are here online are to some degree a family, and the fact that we’ve never met doesn’t matter at this point. We share your sorrow. And so it was from DeputyCarl and Blankster, KidFlash 95 and Bottom9th, from RiSpec and Pogman, and Jim Harpp, known as Bocephus69. They may have had silly names—okay, they did have silly names—but they didn’t just coast through. Even in this online venue, which allowed the least personal of interactions, they made it personal. And they made it better.

I had an even closer group online. For a couple of years I had been corresponding in e-mails with some UNC basketball fans. We had first posted on the America Online bulletin boards made for UNC fans, but it became increasingly peopled by “anybody-but-UNC” fans, and we found refuge in private group e-mails. We were spread out across the country, e-mailing our comments about the program, the recruits, and the games to one another. We’d cheer when someone’s child would be admitted to Carolina. We told each other our triumphs and our defeats. Though we had never seen each other, we were friends. In a lull in the season—Thanksgiving or Christmas of 1995—I had noticed that one of the participants, John Schoo, had an interest in adventure travel. Over several weeks, I talked to him about Wade’s trip to Kilimanjaro and his desire to go on another adventure with his father the following summer. I asked him what he suggested, and he told me of a trip he had taken with his son. He sent me a picture of a handsome blonde young man and himself perched in an open-topped