Recently, I was thrilled to get an email from someone I’ve known since college, more than 70 years ago. Though Jenny and I seldom got together—she lived in Toronto, while I’m in New Jersey—we talked on the phone, and every Christmas, we exchanged cards, enclosing long, newsy letters.
Until that email came, I thought Jenny was dead. When you’re 90 or thereabouts and a distant friend dies, often the only way you find out is when there’s no card at Christmas. For the last two years, I’d had no card from Jenny.
I had looked online for an obituary, but there wasn’t one. I’d thought about phoning Toronto, but I barely knew her husband. I imagined asking for Jenny when he picked up the phone, and how it would hurt him to have to explain that she was gone. I just couldn’t do it. There was no one else I could ask—I’d lost touch with all our mutual friends.
Finally, I accepted the fact that Jenny had died. I missed her. When we got together, in person or by phone, we always took up just where we’d left off. She was warm, smart, funny, passionate about all kinds of things and always ready to laugh at herself.
So when the email came, I was overjoyed: Jenny was alive! The message was quite short:
Please write me and let me know how you are. I am chugging along and will write a message once I hear from you.
I almost fired off a long response, but it didn’t sound like Jenny. She wrote the way she talked, fast and funny. When I read her Christmas letters, I could hear her voice, and this wasn’t it. So I sent a tentative reply:
Jenny, is that really you? I’ve sent my usual Xmas letters and got no response. I assumed the worst! How are YOU?
The answer came a few hours later:
Yes! It’s really me! I know! It is terrible how we are losing our closest friends one by one. I can’t tell you how glad I am to receive this message from you! I will write you a message with some detail about me, but I would LOVE to hear about you!!!
Thank God, you’re still here! Lately, I have been trying to reconnect with friends. I also am looking up people who were important in my life. I just finished reading an obit on Mike Graham. I shed a few tears when I think of what a tragedy it was that he died so young! Terrible.
That sounded even less like Jenny. If she was too busy to send a long email, she’d have explained why in her usual, breathless fashion. And Mike was a friend of mine, but I wasn’t aware that she knew him. He died in his 30s. Why would she be reading his obit now?
I wanted to believe the emails were from Jenny, but I had a strong hunch they came instead from someone who hoped to get details from me that they could use to rob me. These days, an awful lot of scams target older people, on the assumption that some (maybe most) of us are addled enough to believe almost anything.
I delayed answering. After two days with no further emails from the person who might or might not be Jenny, I reluctantly concluded I really was being scammed. I bit the bullet and called her number in Toronto. If someone had hacked her email account and was using it to try to defraud her friends, her husband would want to know. But there was no answer at their home.
I’d have given almost anything to be wrong, but I was as sure as I could be that I was the intended victim of an online, phishing expedition. I was relieved that I hadn’t been sucked in, but sad all over again that I’d never see—or hear from—Jenny again.
It was a cruel hoax.
Flora Davis has written scores of magazine articles and is the author of five nonfiction books, including the award-winning Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960 (1991, 1999). She currently lives in a retirement community and continues to work as a writer.
