The gods of social networking say I should reconnect with Greg Thompson. It has been months since anyone has written to him. Facebook wants to give him a nudge, a word or two to draw him back into the fold. The site tells me over and over to reach out. Write on his wall. Send a message. He doesn’t have a profile picture. Can I suggest one?

No, I can’t. We were classmates from the first day of kindergarten, through the second year of junior college, but it has been years since our paths diverged. Though Facebook has transformed the way people stay in touch — with more than 400 million active members, it’s by far the world’s most popular site for online social networking — the website still doesn’t understand that some connections will never be made. It keeps trying to force things that aren’t meant to be.

Facebook prods, and still the Greg Thompson page resists its potential. There are no posts describing what’s for dinner, no thoughts on life’s blessings or its petty aggravations. He hasn’t been tagged in a single photo. And I’ve been forced to keep up with him the old-fashioned way, through small-town gossip:

The word had swirled through our town one weekend in February. As noon approached on that Saturday, at the height of a “Redneck Muddy Gras” party deep in eastern Texas, a group of friends were riding four-wheelers when one of them noticed a tire floating in a pond. As the woman rode closer she realized there were four tires, and they belonged to an overturned ATV. When she looked into the water about six feet from the bank, she thought she saw the crown of a person’s head.

Greg Thompson and I grew up in Texas’ Piney Woods, attending school in a class of around a hundred students. We have known death. A kid who sat at my table during art period shot his girlfriend’s brains out when she tried to steal the money he’d earned from crack cocaine sales. One of the guys who lined up across from me during countless football exercises — who had pummeled me in elementary, junior high and high school — broke into the home of an old invalid he knew, lay a pillow over the sleeping man’s head and bashed it in with a wooden bat. Another teammate strangled the mother of his child during a fight in her front yard.

Those classmates have killed others, but Greg Thompson is our first to die. It is his distinction. Beyond that, what can I tell you about this person I no longer knew? In school, he was shy and quiet and still had plenty of friends. Though he didn’t talk much, he had a way of looking at you and shaking his head, as though to say he could see through all of your phoniness. He’d let it slide, this one time.

After school he went to work in the oilfield, the default industry for men from our area. On Friday, Feb. 12, he was camping with friends at a muddin’ park called Shiloh Ridge, where they were partying for Muddy Gras. According to a local sheriff’s report, when his friends went to sleep around 11:30 or midnight, “Mr. Thompson was aggravated and advised he wasn’t going to bed yet and he was going to stand by the fire.” A couple of hours later, the friends awoke to the roar of Thompson’s Kawasaki leaving camp. He wasn’t seen again till 11:40 a.m. the next day, when a woman who happened to be a nurse from Louisiana noticed the top of his head in a pond beside the trail.

“I yelled to the others I was riding with,” the woman would later write in a police statement. The group stopped and pulled the man onto the bank. “He was rigid cold and completely pale without color except the very top of his head from the bridge of his nose upwards.”

Though he showed no signs of life, the nurse tried to resuscitate him. On the second set of compressions, muddy water spilled from his lungs. A sheriff’s deputy arrived a couple of hours later. He could find no sign of injury, and the best he could figure, Greg Thompson had flipped his ATV into the water and drowned.

I had bumped into him a few weeks earlier. Around the time of his thirtieth birthday, he came by my brother’s shop to have some work done to his car. We talked for a minute, and he didn’t say a word about dying.

When Facebook tells me to reconnect with him, I can’t help but think about his final moments at the bottom of that pond. It is horrifying to contemplate. I imagine the terror and panic as he thrashed to free himself from the four-wheeler; the instant when his need to breathe trumped everything else and he gasped for air, only to inhale muddy water. He tried to cough it up, thus inhaling more, and he probably choked for several minutes — minutes, not seconds — before losing enough oxygen that he slipped into unconsciousness. After that, more than half an hour could have passed before he died.

Poor Greg Thompson. It is horrifying to contemplate so much suffering, so much agony in one anonymous death.

I must have known him since kindergarten, although I really can’t remember. When children are that young, they become friends without noticing. They bond through shared experience, building a sandcastle or smashing one, catching bugs, exploring a playground, whatever.

Those little friendships can last for years, or they can be as fleeting as an afternoon at the park.

When I was very young I spent a lot of time thinking about temporary friends and saying goodbye, especially on summer vacations or during visits to other towns. In my mind, each kid’s life was represented by a red line that occupied the same dark plane. When our paths crossed, the lines would intersect and then shoot away. But even as our lives carried us farther from each other, we maintained a connection at the node where we had met.

Viewed from above, the crisscrossing lines from so many encounters resembled a giant web. I wondered who the other kids would meet and whether two friends of mine would ever connect elsewhere, someday realizing they shared a common link through me. I asked a kid at a campground in Texas if he knew the kid who’d helped me dig a hole in the beach the previous summer. If I met a kid from Oklahoma, I asked if he knew my cousins from Oklahoma.

Nobody knew each other, and I forgot about my web of lines till just now. If I were growing up today, maybe I wouldn’t see the lines at all but rather a Facebook-style digital network. Now that I’m older, Facebook is my principal tie to friends and acquaintances from the various periods of my life. Eventually, of course, we’ll all be dead.

When a person dies, Facebook does allow profiles to be “memorialized” so they won’t appear in friend suggestions and status updates. To memorialize a profile, friends or family must fill out a form and provide a link to an obituary or show other proof of death.

The etiquette for survivors is still open for debate. On a Facebook discussion board last year, a young guy in Japan wrote about the dilemma after one of his classmates died suddenly at the age of 22.

“First of all we are in doubt whether to remove her as a friend,” he wrote. “It seems too cold to remove her right away, but too Morbid to have a dead person as your friend. We sort of decided that we remove after her funeral, this marking some sort of ending. … One more thing is that one person wrote on that person wall, sort of a ‘nice knowing you’ post. People are divided over whether its a sick or nice gesture.”

Facebook, the guy wrote, is like a virtual grave. “However, this has a big problem. If you still want to be able to see their full profile you have to keep them as your friend, which is just bad style.”

Most of the time I ignore Facebook when it tells me to recommend a photo for Greg Thompson. I click on his link sometimes, though, and I visit his page. Since he doesn’t have a picture, he appears as the hollow, white silhouette with a cowlick and narrow shoulders.

It seems as though he’s watching me through a blue window. If I want, I can suggest friends for Greg, send Greg a message or poke Greg.

No one has written on his wall since Feb. 17, when a fellow classmate said, “RIP dear friend, you will be very missed by many.”

He will be missed, but he lives in Facebook. He is 30 years old. Next year he’ll be 31.