I used to spend a fair bit of time talking to friends on IRC. I started as an undergrad in the early 90s, and I spent time in information security communities in the mid and late 90s. Then it turned into mostly grad students who were about my age or a little younger. One of them was my good friend Dave. As the years have gone on, the group has gotten smaller as people moved away and interests changed, but in early 2016, we were still reasonably active on the same private IRC channel. Dave himself had moved first to Halifax, then to Cambridge (England, of course), and eventually Derby. The time zone difference didn't change a lot though, he'd always been a night owl and he'd started doing intermittent sleeping. Our little friend group kept this up throughout the 2000s and 2010s.
In mid-2016,things were still pretty much the same. I'd tell him about my day sometimes, or how my job was going, or something that had frustrated me, or something else that made me happy. Sometimes I'd tell him about music I'd listened to or some code I'd written. He never answered me, but I kept talking to him anyway. We hadn't spoken since March, in fact, but my feelings weren't hurt. My good friend had been dead for months.
This wasn't the first time I'd talked to him without expecting a response. Several years prior, he'd been complaining of lousy balance, at which point, as GenXers, the response was obvious: "Maybe it's a tumour!" Turns out it was, and Dave was in a coma and hors de combat for months. We found out several weeks after the fact; comatose people aren't generally noted for updating their friends on what happened, and his family understandably didn't put top priority on connecting to an IRC server.
After he recovered, he'd lost a lot of use of his right hand side - which would almost certainly figure into his death. He came back to IRC, busting out with "THIS IS THE 80S AND I'M DOWN WITH THE LADIES!" I happened to be around that weekend afternoon and apologised for the bad taste of my previous month or so of ribbing. He thought it was hilarious - of course he did. I wouldn't have told him I felt bad otherwise, that is the man-code.
I think he'd also have found my last words to him hilarious as well: "RIP \". This wasn't unusual, I often said good night to friends like that - not so much any more, of course, some of the humour has left as middle age tightens its grip. He was probably already on his way to the staircase that killed him. He was living alone in a rental at the time, the stair bannister was on the right, he'd been celebrating a promotion and being about to close on a house of his own, and what happened was obvious. His body was found at the bottom of that staircase, after some friends he'd been scheduled to meet the next day got concerned.
Still, I found it comforting to talk to his.. what, his spirit? his avatar? on the same IRC network we'd spent hours talking on. His story isn't mine to tell, but this was by no means previously the one-way relationship it became for a few months. Eventually his friend who had been hosting his shell client pulled the plug, and that was that. But for a few months, I, and I suspect a few of our mutual friends, was able to sort of close out that relationship that had ended so suddenly.