TIFU by waiting too long to reconnect with a friend.
Sorry if this violates the rules, I’m not sure if this counts, and understand if it gets pulled. And a bit of forewarning, a somewhat depressing story is ahead.
So this happened back in 2020, and just kind of resurfaced in my head tonight. Some years prior to the events that lead up to my reason for posting I joined a small MMORPG community and was very active in the guild I joined. I made a lot of friends, but only one I stayed in touch with after I left the game(not by choice, another story for another subreddit), we’ll call him Red. Red and I were pretty tight, we would run quests together and chatted in and out of game all the time, he was like an old friend the way we connected. Some time before I left the game, I found out Red had a serious respiratory condition that was slowly killing him and he needed a transplant to save him. Nothing really changed when I found out the news from Red about his condition, and we continued gaming and bullshitting for a long while after.
Some months after I left the game he and his girlfriend visited my hometown and asked if I would want to meet up and hang out. As I live only 30 minutes away, I was all about it, and we met up. We spent the day roaming around town, checking out one of the museums and having a pretty chill lunch together, good times.. After that meeting we kept chatting on FB and messenger, but over time we slowly drifted apart. And then about a year ago I was going through my friends list and cutting off contacts with whom I wasn’t friends with anymore or felt distant to. Red and I had barely spoken in a year, and as much as I thought it wouldn’t be a huge deal, I unfriended him and decided against messaging him why I had.
Fast forward a few months and I got a message from Red, he expressed that he wanted to reconnect and see how I’ve been, that we’ve been out of touch too long. He also friend requested me the same day, and I gladly accepted, fully intent on catching up as soon as I got back from work that day. As you can imagine life happens and I wouldn’t be writing this if we had talked.. No I got distracted with my usual routine goings on in life, and every time I thought to write him back something else I “needed” to do first or I had something that would distract me until it was late in the evening and I had to get to bed.
Then came one morning February of 2020 I’m getting my workplace open for the day staff, doing my routine checks, when I decide to look at FB. To my surprise I see a post from Red, or rather a family member posting on his account, notifying friends and family alike that he passed away overnight. I was stunned, I knew his health was always a concern, but I had been unaware that his health had taken a turn even after the transplant. He had been through hell and back, and ended up in home hospice in the end.
Now I spent days beating myself up thinking that I didn’t get a chance to talk to him one last time, to let him know I wasn’t just ignoring him. I know that somehow he knows that I’m going to miss him, I just wish I had been a better friend now.
TL;DR I made friends with someone through an MMORPG years ago, left the game but stayed in touch, we met up a couple years later, I failed to stay in touch and they passed away very recently and it hurt like hell finding out.