TheBanyanTree: Old Friends and Good Friends

[Monique Colver]

Sometimes friends come and sometimes they go. Sometimes, like when your
husband develops mental illness, they fade away, merging back into the
blackness of the past as if they’d never been there at all. That was okay
with me – I was busy anyway, taking care of Stew and myself, trying to keep
us afloat.

I lied. It wasn’t okay with me. It wasn’t okay at all. But it happens
anyway, whether I like it or not. It’s not as if people didn’t care, but
perhaps they just didn’t know what to do or what to say. Perhaps they
thought it was contagious, like a common cold, and they feared catching it.
I can see how that can happen. One day they’re happily emailing you and the
next, you’re reporting that your husband has had a psychotic break, and what
are they supposed to do with that information? Best to do nothing with it at
all, pretend you didn’t hear, pretend you didn’t get the email, and don’t
write back. Whatever you do, don’t write back. Wait it out.

I had a friend like that. (Several perhaps, but this is about one of them.)

Had being the operative word there.

It’s not that I held that against her. Why would I? Everyone has their own
stuff to deal with. Everyone has their own . . . je ne sais quoi. (I’m going
with the literal translation here.)

I just like sprinkling my prose with French phrases. It makes me sound
smart, don’t you agree?

I had a friend like that, and after Stew moved away, coincidentally back to
the town she lived in, though she’d never met him and never would, she
tentatively began contacting me again. Maybe she’d just been busy with her
own stuff. I emailed back, and she kept saying that when I came down we’d
have to get together.

Of course I’d get down there – I had to go see my friend Stew some time,
didn’t I?

But it didn’t work out until the last time I went down to see Stew. The
cancer was in its last stages, and there was no question that I’d be there.
Stew’s mom picked me up at the airport, and we went to their home, and I saw
him there, my Stew, so weak and yet as if lit from within, the sort of look
that those close to death can get. Later, after it got dark, I left to check
into my hotel. I went out and got into Stew’s SUV, which I was to use while
in town, and I started crying. And the rain started pouring down.

And I had no one. I’d had to wait until I left the house to cry. I couldn’t
do that there, in front of him, that wouldn’t help him at all, would it? His
parents had enough to deal with without me weeping. And I no longer knew
anyone in this town, no one except my friend who’d said we must get
together, and so I called her.

I just needed someone’s company. My husband was far away at our home, I was
on my phone.

My friend tut tutted, you know what I mean, those sounds people make when
they think they’re being reassuring but they’re really not, and said for me
to give her a call later in the week so we could have lunch.

Lunch? At that moment, all I wanted was for someone to let me lay on their
couch and cover me with a blanket so I could sleep, and not be alone in a
dingy hotel room. I did not want to be alone. Who could sleep on a night
like this?

The rain kept coming down.

My friend was at home, she said, just having a quiet evening, but to please
give her a call in a few days and we’d have lunch. She lived less than ten
minutes away.

I drove to my hotel, and it was a dingy place, but it was in my price range.
On the way I called a true friend, and she consoled me as best she could.
(By on the way I meant that I stopped and made the call while parked, of
course. Crying and torrential rain are bad enough to drive in, without
adding in the phone.) And it helped.

The next day I went to Stew’s house, and I didn’t leave it at night, I fell
asleep on the couch when I was too tired to stay away anymore, and only went
to my hotel during the day to shower and change.

I had no intention of calling my local friend, but she called me a few days
later, and wanted to have lunch.

So I went, though I would have rather stayed with Stew. His mother
encouraged me to go. We went to a restaurant I’d often been to way back when
I lived in this town, and it too was dingy, and had moved.

And my friend and I labored to make conversation. Turns out she didn’t think
of me as a friend at all, but as her secretary. I hadn’t been her secretary
for 20 years, and she still thought of me as that. To my credit, she did say
that I was the only one of her secretaries that she’d stayed in touch with,
and boy, did that make me feel special. I did find out that she was lonely
and isolated since her husband’s death, and I found myself unsurprised.

She emailed me once after that, when she saw Stew’s obituary in the local
paper. I saw no need to respond.

Life is full of lovely fabulous people, and I’m well acquainted with more
than my fair share of them. In fact, I’m pretty certain that fabulous people
are just attracted to me, so many of them do I know. I bet it’s that way for
you too, if you thought about it. So it’s okay to let the old relationships
that no longer work slip away, back into the darkness. There’s always
something better waiting to take its place.

At least that’s my experience.

-- 
Monique Colver