What happens when a beloved blogger disappears?

The blog entry only feels like a farewell in retrospect.

On July 9, Theresa Duncan, cultural critic and filmmaker, posted an excerpt from a Rupert Brooke poem on her Wit of the Staircase blog.

Under the headline “Goodnight, children, we’re in the arms of the Great Lover,” she quoted Brooke’s line, “Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon/Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss/Of blankets…”

The next day, Duncan, 40, lay dead of an apparent pill overdose in her New York City apartment after drafting a suicide note expressing her love for longtime boyfriend Jeremy Blake, the New York Daily News reported.

Blake, at 35 a rising artist, discovered Duncan’s body. A week later, he walked into the ocean from a New York beach, leaving a suicide note with his clothes. On July 22, a body that may have been his was discovered off the New Jersey coast.

The couple had been part of the New York and Los Angeles cultural scene, splitting time between coasts. The Wit of the Staircase, started in 2005, “quickly became a must-read among literary-minded Angeleno Web logs,” the Los Angeles Times noted.

The site’s offbeat name came from a French phrase that “usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended,” Duncan explained in the introduction.

Her writing on subjects ranging from perfume to politics was often witty and occasionally approached perfection. When asked how she might create a Los Angeles scent, Duncan responded with this wonderful riff:

“My cologne is called Santa Ana after the powerful winds that bring desert heat and faraway smell into the city. It smells like: celluloid and sand, coyote fur and car exhaust, contrail cloud and chlorine, bitter orange and stage blood and one bushel of ghostly, shivery night-blooming jasmine flowers like blown kisses from the phantoms of the ten thousand screen beauties who still haunt our hills every full moon because they think it’s a stage light.”

When word of Duncan’s death and Blake’s disappearance circulated around the blogosphere July 19, I decided to take a pass. You never want to glamorize suicide, for one thing. For another, the story was hazy, hard to grasp.

The L.A. Times reported the couple believed they were being harassed by Scientologists (an allegation the church denies). Indeed, Duncan had posted a rambling blog entry to that effect May 13. A friend told the paper, “The story they had woven in paranoia and conspiracies took over part of their lives.”

None of it made sense, so I moved on – until two things happened. First, a San Francisco power outage last Tuesday took down multiple blog sites, including TypePad, Duncan’s host. For a time, her online presence was snuffed out, underscoring that the virtual blogworld is as fragile as the real lives it chronicles.

Also, Duncan’s fans started writing in blog comments and message boards about the strong connection they’d felt to her simply through reading her posts.

“I … never met Duncan, but always figured I would someday,” wrote Kevin Roderick, editor of Los Angeles media blog LA Observed. He called Duncan’s site “a personal favorite.”

“I never approached her in public, but I always thought I might some day,” echoed a commenter at Perfumeoflife.org. “I so loved her writing that I was slightly afraid to approach her and have an awkward encounter that might take away from (the) private joy I took from her blog.”

Why do some bloggers forge such deep connections with readers through an essentially ephemeral medium? Maybe it’s the false intimacy that comes from stumbling on someone’s personal diary. Maybe it’s the near-constant interaction via keyboard and screen.

One thing’s for sure: When that connection is suddenly, unexpectedly severed, it can really hurt.