Being anywhere other than in this present moment is a form of slavery.
Author unknown
A shocking and unexpected reminder of my mortality, and a flood of conflicting memories descended on me Saturday when I learned from an old friend that a mutual friend of ours had died suddenly last week.
C. was at one time, along with his wife, my closest and best friend. During our 20s and into our 30s, from 1974 through the early 1980s, our bond seemed unalterable.
We spent hours and hours in the most pleasurable kind of deep discussions late into many nights. We could talk about anything. We savored each other ‘s company and presence. I had never experienced anything like that in my life, nor have I since. It was a once-in-a lifetime friendship.
But with all friendships at that level, the intensity and sheer power of personality of one or the other, combined with very strange, yet predictably destructive life events and circumstances, created huge cracks that affected each of us. It led in part to my prolonged crisis with major depression in 1978 and 1979, partly due to his drug abuse at the time, and the religious conversion that followed.
But I am persistent, and it was hard to imagine life without them. This should have been a red flag. But it wasn’t then or later.
I healed myself of the depression, and came back into their lives after the illness had pushed me away from everyone, including family members who tried so valiantly and successfully to help me. I learned that those family bonds and love are what truly constitute unconditional love.
To gain their renewed friendship, love and respect, I became more like them than I ever should have. Long story here. I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say, their influence, together with the nature of the profound loss and redemption I experienced from depression, and what was revealed to me as a result of that debilitating mental illness, led in 1980 to my own conversion, and the teaching job that remains the most gratifying, though very brief, job experience of a lifetime.
In the decades that followed I still thought of them often, even as we rarely saw each other and never spoke by phone. We emailed from time to time, and exchanged Christmas cards.
They had by then a large and ever-growing family. When I did visit, we enjoyed each other’s company, but it was nothing like before. It perhaps could have been, but they had changed too much. I still recognized glimmers of the old C. from our days when he was in newspaper work and I was doing that also, and then teaching. We had a lot in common back then.
I remember vividly when he and his wife and two of their sons visited me at my mother’s house not long before she died. This was probably in 2019.
They cared deeply about me, and I about them, but with the realization, on my part for sure, that we were no longer close friends, and that basically all we had was our memories. For ordinary friendships and acquaintances, that may be fine, but with what we once shared, memories alone just aren’t enough. At least for me.
I am speaking for myself here because we never discussed anything of substance in all the years since we had once been so close and talked about so much that was important in our lives. Politics and religion, or even spirituality, were off limits. This was taken for granted. That inevitably created a shallow relationship, again, surviving on memories, in place of the deep one formerly. I was in denial about this because I always thought things might change, somehow, some way. This I now realize was delusory.
The sad thing is that with all their many children and grandchildren I feel quite sure I was rarely ever in their thoughts. But they were often in mine, inexplicably, and I was stuck in a golden, gauzy warm past with memories of so many good times. But along with those memories were also some very bad and extremely painful ones, all much more involved and intricate to go into here.
The rather tragic irony in all this is that for decades we have had nothing in common, yet in my mind and imagination that was never as consequential as it should have been. That could eventually be overcome. Maybe things could be at least partially like they once were. I knew better, though, and always did.
He’s gone now. The first friend in my generation to die. It still seems rather surreal. And this is largely because I have such a hard time letting go of the past. The level of my self-entrapment by the past is not, and never has been healthy. This sudden event of his passing finally has made me acknowledge the truth. It doesn’t change what once was, but it does put things in better perspective.
It saddens me deeply that our disparate religious and political views were always the unspoken and avoided topics of discussion, but ultimately became the final wedge because we wren’t able or willing to come to a fully honest grip on our shared pasts or even ur present lives. We never said to each other things that needed to be said. And certainly not how we felt in this horrendous political climate we’re now living through.
The last time I saw them was in November 2024, and we talked and reminisced for an hour on the deck by the tidal creek outside my apartment. It was a very brief trip back in time to better days of our friendship. It was pleasant, but it was quick. They had to be on their way.
As I mentioned earlier they were often on my mind, and will continue to be, but grief and shock at this loss will always be tempered now with the realization that the friendship was only memories at the end. And it’s I, not them, who clung to those memories when they should have faded away as we each went about our separate lives.
Their family and church life, their children’s careers and jobs, and their own families growing and putting down roots and producing grandchildren. Always re-enforces how totally different our licenses were and made me wonder gone we could possibly have remained friends for so long. The answer again: my memories of them.
I now must resolve that this chapter in my life is closed and finished. Perhaps this moment in time in late June of 2026 will mark a new beginning where I can place painful memories that I have been unable to let go into their own final closed chapters. In this way, true awareness and enjoyment of the present can occur. I’ll still go back often to the past through my writings, photos, keepsakes and memorabilia, and through all the good memories I am blessed with. I am my past, as I’ve said many times, but I’m not going to be ruled by it.
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