It has happened, moar than once.
The most painful, was a guy - a fellow drunk, back in the Bad Old Days, but a good guy at heart. When I needed help he was there.
But my life was coming apart - me in my late twenties, he about five years older; we met, working at the same government offices...I was out of work and the ex was tossing me, and I showed up to the Navy recruiter, and raised my right hand. "Do me!"
Meantime, he had his own quirks. In addition to his own liquor issue, he had a sex problem. He was white but grew up in a neighborhood that was almost-100-percent black. He wasn't poor; his grandparents owned a nice house in the neighborhood. They didn't believe in White Flight; the house was paid for and they thought the neighborhood, with imaginative streets, and architecturally-interesting homes, would survive.
So all the girls he knew as a kid, were black girls. Yeah. Jungle Fever.
But he wasn't onboard with ghetto behavior or morality. So...he was on a long search for a decent black woman.
He never really found one, but he did marry one, and she didn't much like his drinking. Or him, I guess. I know she didn't like me, much. I was pretty-much shoved off to the side.
So I was in the Navv, in Californistan, and then in the great big sand-box that's now jammed up by the water toll-gate. I called him a few times. He couldn't call me; cellphones were expensive toys. I didn't have one.
I got out, didn't go back to Ohio. Not for some years. In Colorado, got into railroading; then traveled for a couple years; and then stumbled into a railroad slot right in Cleveland. I was thinking about my aging, ill parents. I was also thinking, a drinking problem doesn't go well with a railroad career. Bob and I were BAD NOOZE together.
I never reached out. Not until after I left CSX, and then got pushed out of the Canadian National system, and just before I started with Montana Rail Link. I went looking for what he was up to.
It was easier, back 14 years ago. I stumbled upon an obituary notice. Very short. 2003...long before I left CSX.
I also came across a filing for divorce, six months before.
Then, I went looking for the house. The house was gone. The lot had been cleared and was being mowed...by someone. A corner lot. It was in what Cleveland called its "Land Bank." No recorded private owner.
I couldn't find out why the house was demolished. Did it burn down? Bob was a smoker. Was he drunk and smoking in bed? Was the house torched? Had he been murdered in bed? His only remaining relative was a sister he was estranged from. Did she just abandon the burned-out structure?
Or was it sitting empty, torched...or just looted and destroyed by squatters. Google Maps was no help - the oldest Street View showed the lot vacant.
To this day I don't know. I don't know if it would have done him any good to have connected. It probably would have cost me my job, though....