Losing friends
I lost two old friends within the span of a week last month. This deeply shook me up because the deaths were so sudden and unexpected.
Although we no longer had any contact with each other, sadly, memories of good times with them and all we shared over many years have constantly revisited me lately as I pondered the strange new reality they they are no longer with us.
I wrote about one of those friends here just recently before he died. It’s still a huge shock to even write that word.
I had known him since 1974 when we worked on a college newspaper together. A deep friendship formed and a close bond of shared good memories that lasted until fairly recently in diminished form until events and circumstances left no doubt that there was nothing left but memories.
He died very suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and, although we had drifted very far apart and had nothing in common anymore, I feel an immense void knowing I will not re-connect with him. Before his passing there was at least the possibility although deep down I didn’t see it happening.
The other death was my closest co-worker friend at the library whom I spoke with every day for 20 years. I had lost touch with him, except for occasional texting, since I retired, but also held out hope for a reunion. Now that’s gone, too. His passing was also very sudden.
Needless to say this has all been, in addition to the seemingly endless reminders of old age, a wake-up call about the fragile mortality we all share in this life. When we’re younger, death is far off in the future somewhere, rarely thought about.
Friendships that are slowly lost over time, especially those that were once the deepest and most consequential, can be likened to the process of slowly dying. One becomes sadly aware that most friendships don’t last, they die, and there’s no going back to try to reclaim them. Instead, we are left to silently mourn what could have yet been, even if that was an illusion.
Finally, these thoughts. All through life there are songs we associate with certain friends, relationships, and life events that correspond emotionally with the beginnings of the end of them.
The recent sudden passing of the singer Bonnie Tyler brought to mind several of those songs that made me think of people I was, or had been close to. They are beautiful but sad songs that leave me deeply immersed in the past and mournfully fixated for a brief time on those big, unanswerable questions we feel compelled to ask, such as: “What if things had been different?” and “Why did it have to happen?” I’ll never fully know the answers, but at least I have a good idea now that I am old enough to understand.
Bonnie Tyler’s most famous song was “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but the song I never forgot was “It’s a Heartache” from 1978, the year I experienced my first bout of clinical depression. As I was recovering in the Spring of 1979, I listened to that song over and over, as it pierced my heart with the deepest kind of emotion.
Two others are:
“If you leave me now”
By Chicago (1976)
And, “A Summer Song” by Chad and Jeremy (released in 1964)
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