There are times when I know what will set off a grief storm.  And there are others I do not see coming.

When Jane was still alive, we would go out to breakfast on the weekend at a little bagel shop not far from our home. While Saturday mornings were always a mixed bag of largely changeable faces, Sundays were very different. Virtually every Sunday, the same group was in attendance–and we became friendly with a large number of those folks.

Among them was a mentally challenged young man who loved sports. He and Jane would touch base every week about the Red Sox or golf or the Celtics or the Patriots. There was no pretense about him and we all enjoyed our Sunday morning encounters.

After Jane’s death, I tried to make contact with all the regulars so they would know what had happened. But it is hard when you only know people by their first names and what they did (or once did) for a living. And one of those I did not catch up with was that young man.

Since then, my appearances at the shop have been relatively rare–and I have avoided the times we were usually there. It was six months before I could even go in the door at all after the funeral. Our regular days and times are still things I do not have the heart for.

I went in Wednesday morning of this week–and there was our friend. He was at his usual table–a bit later than when he used to be there. We nodded to each other as I stood in line. He came over and asked how I was doing. And then he asked where Jane was.

He didn’t know.

I teared up as I told him she had died. He teared up as well.

I got a note this week from a student I had not seen since shortly after Jane and I got engaged. She had come across my Facebook page a few days before. Her  letter was upbeat and gave a quick synopsis of what she had spent the last 20 years doing. At the end, she asked how I was doing and if I was still teaching.

She didn’t know. After I came back from the grief that stirred up, I wrote back about Jane.

And I realized that with all the students we have out there that there are going to be large numbers of them who will not have heard–and for whom the news will touch off a small avalanche of grief. Our children of the mind will get the news in dribs and drabs–one here, two there, four or five a month from now or a year from now.

I learned this winter that my favorite teacher from high school had died 18 months earlier. There was a stab of pain and guilt. I should have kept up with him. I failed to do so–failed to tell him again what he had meant to me as a teenager and a young man.

But that is very much the world we live in. We leave our home villages. We go where our work takes us. And sometimes the news is slow to reach us despite all our technological devices.

For all our social media, sometimes we still live in 1750.