To Absent Friends

One of the great truths revealed to those of us who have lived long and colorful lives—and which should be impressed upon the young even though they probably won't believe it—is that friendships come and go.

Stop and think of five people who you consider your good friends, your "squad" in today's parlance. Now think of how many of those five have been consistently on that list.

In your twenties, you think that the people you hang out with will be there for you for the entire journey through life. If you're very lucky, when all is said and done, maybe two or three will still be there as you loose your mortal coil. The vast majority however, will have disappeared either through attrition, misunderstandings, or simply by drifting away.

This is a lesson that still stings when I think of that one particular friend in Tucson whom I've written about before. But I realized while going through my address book recently that I have dozens of names and phone numbers listed, but precious few of those names are of people with whom I have active, ongoing relationships.

I guess you could call them zombie friendships.

Interests change. Passions ebb and flow. You'll always have that one friend who knows where all the bodies are buried (and who probably helped you dig the holes), and one or two who you can call on a whim to meet for coffee and no matter what they're doing they'll will put it on hold to rush out and meet you. Then you'll have the casual friends, the third-party friends-of-friends, and the work friends who you don't mind spending 8 hours a day with but wouldn't dream of seeing after hours (but who occasionally transition into that first or second group). Then there are the internet friends—some of whom you feel closer to and seem to know better than the flesh-and-blood buddies sitting across the table from you.

One of the advantages of having our contacts in electronic form these days is that we're not reminded quite as often of this unending churn happening in our lives. It's easy to delete names of anyone you're no longer in contact with and years from now you'll be hard pressed to remember who they were (although it's an admittedly difficult thing for me to do; I still have info for people I worked with five years ago, even though I know I'll probably never reach out to any of them ever again).

It's not as quite so easy to forget the souls who have passed through your life if you have a physical, hand-written address book. When I pull out an old flip-up rolodex I have from the 80s, it saddens me to look through it and realize how many people I've lost contact with, and—having lived through the AIDS decimation of the 90s—how many of those people aren't even alive any longer. But yet I hold onto it, if only to keep their memory.

I think that's one reason that as we get older we treasure the friendships we have even more than we did when we were young—especially the ones that have spanned decades—because we never know if they'll last another week, another year, or until our dying breath…