About two months ago I lost one of my oldest friends. Someone I had known since I was around 15 years old. I had wanted to put something on my blog, but found it hard to express what the loss felt like to me. And then, today, I found an extract from Anna Quindlan's new memoir/autobiography, and it fit the bill. And yes, everything she says is correct. Old friends - they know you. They remember things. They have grown older along with you.
Old friends are not necessarily best friends. But they are friends who hold part of your past and so they hold part of you. And when they die, a little part of you dies too. I remember a very elderly relative saying , aged one hundred and one...... "everyone I knew is gone. There is no-one left that knows me now". Not quite true, as of course there was still some family members left, but I understood the sentiment. So thank you Anna Quindlan, for your fitting words:
“The thing about old friends is not
that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that
disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne,
and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of
seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in
your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look
at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old
along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're
used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk
of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami,
the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a
measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is
singular, one beloved at a time".
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