The Ethics of the Internet Search

            

 

 

     I was online recently with someone from my high school, and he asked me if I had kept in touch with a particular girl that I had known when she and I were about fourteen or fifteen. I honestly hadn't thought of her in thirty years.  The friend who asked thought she may have died, since no one from the town where our high school is located seems to know where she is, and one of them thought someone with her last name had died. This wouldn't be an incredible surprise, if true, because almost half of our high school classmates have died, which is way more than actuarial tables would have predicted for people our age. A large number of my classmates died in one car accidents within their first few years of driving in the Northeastern Winters. A few died in serious car accidents while in college, including one of my closest friends, whom I occasionally still see in dreams when I am having a particularly difficult time with something here on Earth. Among my classmates from high school, there have been a smattering of suicides from college age, through to the present, and one of us died in a fire. In the last few years several of our class died of cancer, and two of lupus. I didn't set out to keep precise records of what has happened to us, but it has worked out that way.

                I hadn't thought about the girl my friend asked me about for a long time, but when I did think of her, I had many happy memories. She and I had not really been friends, but we shared about eight or nine classes together within a couple of years, and so we knew one another fairly well. So, when I had a chance, I did an internet search with the things I knew of her. It took only about twenty minutes to find that she had left the state just after high school, and had married twice. She went to college in another state, and now had two children. She had become a fairly recent grandmother, and still worked in health care. I did not have the same luck in locating her siblings, one of which I knew. One of them had died, and I presume this is what my friend heard, when he assumed that she had been the one who had passed.  Although the searching was nothing my friend could not have done himself had he spent the time, I decided not to divulge all that I learned to him.  Had my friend wished to stay in touch with people from her high school, then she would have, just as I stay in touch with selected people from that time. It appears that she hasn't wanted to. Perhaps such a beautiful girl had a stalker in high school. I could believe that she would have.  I told my friend that she was alive, had married twice and lived out of state, and that seemed to satisfy his curiosity.  "But is she still beautiful?", he asked. I have no idea, but if I had to guess, my guess would be that she still is.