Friends

Last week, two friends wrote me of the death of close friends. One wrote that when he heard the news of his friend’s death, he felt that "part of his reality was fading away." The other wrote that she and her husband were “beyond sad…We have lost enough people to know that a day comes when you are used to their not being there and can think of them without crying, but we aren't there yet.”

I know what they mean, because I've lost close friends too. At my age, it’s almost inevitable that this should be so. My friends’ recent bereavements made me reflect on the nature of friendship and why it should be so important in our lives. When I consider my good friends, all of them offer understanding, sympathy, and empathy - emotional support, in other words - and all of them are a pleasure to be with (or to correspond with, since some of my friendships are primarily epistolary). I feel I can be myself with them, without pretense, without fear of criticism. These are qualities one finds in one’s spouse, if one is lucky enough to be in a good marriage. So why do we look for friends as well?

For one thing, each friendship extends our experience, since each person is an entire world, a unique world, a world into which we enter by virtue of our friendship. Also, it’s hard to get enough of the support and validation one receives from friends. We are, after all, social creatures, and our views of ourselves are created in part by our interactions with others. We find it deeply satisfying when people we respect and like show respect and liking for us.

At my age, there’s little time to create, in a new friendship, “the continuous, organic, thickening of relationship,” in Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg’s felicitous phrase, that's characteristic of friendship as well as of love. Its creation requires years if not decades. Still, it’s important for the old to seek new friends, younger friends. We cannot replace old friends who one by one will drop away, but if we live long enough and make no new friends, we’ll finish our lives with no friends at all.

So my wife and I reach out to our neighbors, to members of our congregation, and to those we meet through old friends, and we've begun to establish new friendships. In our old age, we're engaged again in spinning webs of friendship. May we live long enough for them to become as thick as possible, given the time that is left.