I knew that something was wrong when I heard my brother’s voice on the phone, and he told me that his closest high school friend had died. He was challenged by a variety of health concerns and died at only 64–too young– we commiserated. A wild and free-spirited lad, he stayed back in our small hometown while my brother went off to college, graduate school and eventually to Chicago and Montana. Despite the thousands of miles and lifestyle differences, they remained friends, history and many funny stories sustaining them as they visited when my brother came to Texas. Long telephone conversations in between the visits when his friend’s health began to fail made it possible for my brother to share in that too as he provided some of his expertise from his field of pharmacology.
In subsequent days, there were many tributes and photos on social media; gloriously beautiful, crazy young men with their long shaggy hair and no shirts at Matagorda Beach. It was difficult not to get melancholy for youth and energy and potential as I looked at them. 50 years on, these young men no longer exist as they had and some of them are gone, either dead or out of touch with people who had been everything to them at one point in their lives.
In my doula work, friends of the dying person are often around; they sit patiently, weeping as they watch their old friend die. I encourage them to talk about their times together and often, we all end up laughing as the tales of adventures, shared important passages like marriage, children, divorce, and career moves all come alive once again. At times, this turns out to be a kind of life review for the dying one; even if they are tired and beginning to leave the world, they often join in and perk up as the stories unfold. How rich it is for them to be able to hear this appreciation from their friends!
Friends choose to be in our lives in a way that our relatives might feel that they have no choice but to be. Perhaps because it is a choice, friends often know us better than our families. At certain stages of development, our teen years for example, we age in parallel together. We learn from each other in our actions and in watching our friends make their choices. Friends know our quirks and our fears; they can talk us down and push us to be courageous, even if we do not want to. Most of us have those friends who we might not see for years and yet, when we do, it is as if we have not been apart at all. Could it be that the shared history and the vulnerability we have shown is what makes that possible? I think so.
When friends, particularly the “old” ones die, the grief is complex; we lose both the friend and who we were with them. Our friends reflected us in them; they helped us to define who we were and when they die, it changes our identity, too. The shared history freezes in time. It reminds us that we, too, will die.
Before we do, there is the time in which a combination of nostalgia, bittersweetness and grief might stay with us. People who live for an exceedingly long time often outlive all their friends; they speak of this with sadness and loneliness. One client told me that being the “last one standing” made it easier for her to die.
It is our fate as humans to connect with others, care deeply and then grieve for them when they are gone. I last saw my brother’s friend about 10 years ago after my father’s funeral. We gathered at the bar where he worked; he comforted us, spoke of my father and of knowing him as a kid. What I remember the most, though, was the way in which he made my brother laugh.