A Friendship Without Goodbye (And the Postcard That Remains)

She lived in Maine, I live in Pennsylvania. We never sat across from each other, but we shared three years of conversations, encouragement, and laughter. And then, one day, she was simply gone. This is the story of an online friendship, and what it means to say goodbye without ever having met.

I still have a postcard she sent me. Her handwriting, the stamp, the way she signed her name… small, ordinary things that remind me Lisa was here. Proof that our friendship wasn’t just pixels on a screen.

We live in a strange age of friendship. Connections spark across screens, nurtured not in coffee shops or living rooms but through Zoom calls, FaceTime chats, and Facebook messages. These bonds can be just as real as the ones formed across a kitchen table, but they come with a quiet fragility.

Back in 2021, after taking an online branding master class with Mark Schaefer, I was paired with a woman named Lisa. We were matched simply to keep the momentum going… to have someone to share ideas with, to lean on during the ups and downs of building a business, to keep the creative spark alive. What came of that pairing was not just accountability, but a genuine friendship.

For three years, Lisa and I checked in… sometimes every week, sometimes only after a month or two had passed. Life ebbed and flowed, but we always found each other again. We swapped stories, encouraged each other’s projects, and sent little gifts. She lived in Maine, and I’d tell her, “As soon as I make it there, you’re first on my list!” We always believed we’d meet in person someday; we even started talking about taking a road trip together through the Great Smoky Mountains via the Blue Ridge Parkway.

But someday never came.

It had been about six weeks since we last connected online, a little longer than usual, so I checked her Facebook page to wish her a happy birthday. What I found instead stopped me in my tracks: a wall of condolences. “Happy birthday in heaven.” I scrolled, hoping I was misunderstanding, but the messages kept coming. And there it was, confirmation that Lisa was gone.

And that’s what makes this loss so hard. When you lose someone you’ve never met in person but who mattered deeply in your life, there’s no script for it. Her family never knew my name. If I had died first, Lisa would have been left with the same silence. To them, I’m a stranger. To me, she was a friend.

But Lisa wasn’t only a friend. She was a lifeline for my work. We pushed each other forward when the road felt hard. We celebrated the little wins and reminded each other to keep going when it seemed easier to quit. She understood me in ways only a fellow traveler in this creative business world could. A lot of the reason I’m restructuring and going strong now is because of her steady encouragement. She gave me the strength to keep pushing through.

That’s the reality of friendships formed online. They’re real. They shape us. They give us laughter, encouragement, and hope. But when they end, there’s no funeral to attend, no flowers to send, no easy way to say goodbye. Just a sudden absence.

The truth is, I’m doing this next chapter partly for her. For all the conversations where she told me I could do it. For every time she nudged me forward when I was second-guessing myself. I wish she were here to see it. She would want me to finally do the things I always said I was going to do. And so I will.

There’s a quiet kind of grief in losing someone your family never knew existed. But there’s also beauty in knowing that, for a season, our paths ran side by side. Lisa’s gone, but her kindness lingers. And that, I think, is what it means to have truly mattered.

When I miss her most, I look at that postcard. Her words on paper remind me that our friendship was real, and that a piece of her is still here with me.

Maybe that’s why I’m writing this… to say out loud what has nowhere else to go. To honor a friendship that mattered, even if it existed only on a screen. And to remind myself, and maybe you too, that love and loss don’t need a handshake to be real.