Look Him Up or Leave it Alone?

by Sarah Jane Shangraw

“It was born during a very difficult time, and there was guilt at first. The early holidays were tough,” says Jack. But they’re glad they hoed that row. “We were both in bad situations and even seriously sick—and we say our illness were manifestations of our unhappiness,” explains Lorna. She left her husband and got together with Jack a year after reconnecting and corresponding. “We say we saved each others lives.”

A woman we’ll call June carefully considered rekindling with a long lost love in 2001. Thirty-four years before, she said goodbye to Gary on an exit ramp off California’s Highway 5, where he dropped her off after a night spent together rekindling the romance they had left behind when he had left for the Air Force and later, Vietnam. He had returned but was still in the Air Force, and she was a “flower-child” about to establish legal residency in Canada—they did not pursue a relationship at that time.

In the ensuing years June got married and had a child, and moved to England. But she never completely forgot Gary. In 2001, her marriage ended and she went through a period of great upheaval as she planned to move back to the U.S. While chatting with a co-worker about her childhood memories of the States, she described Gary, the boy she once loved. Later that day, her curiosity aroused by the conversation, she poked around on classmates.com. She had to enter personal information, including her email address, but stopped short of completing the process when she was prompted for payment. “It scared me. I thought ‘What am I doing?’ and I shut the computer down.”

Mere hours later—and thousands of miles away—Gary commenced his last-ditch effort to try to find June. Plagued by dreams of her and the idea they could have conceived a child together during their night together in California decades ago, he had been looking for her for years. He told himself this was his last try and then it would be time to forget her and move on. He went to classmates.com, plugged in her high school, graduation date, and name. Voilà—there was her email address.

“For the next six months, we wrote emails to each other almost daily,” says Jane. “Slowly, slowly we opened up. We hoped there might be a chance to rekindle in person what was happening extremely well in cyberspace, but both realized that it could all become starkly apparent when we physically met, that this was just a fanciful dream.”