Category: Relationships

Random Thoughts on 32 Years of Friendship

A solo car ride is the perfect time for me to squeeze in uninterrupted contemplation. On my way to any given destination, random thoughts wander in and out of my mind like deviant tumbleweeds, and I’ll choose the most entertaining one to untangle as I pensively drive along.

It’s not a full-on daydream. Unlike my husband, who I frequently catch gazing out the driver-side window at a bird or pebble, I’m more than capable of remaining focused on the road while concurrently scripting my imaginary podcasts. I haven’t crashed in over 30 years, so don’t come at me!

A few days before Christmas, I was heading to my friend Hilda’s house for a pre-holiday lunch with the third member of our trio Karen. The quiet drive was a perfect opportunity for me to relax and reflect on the meaning behind the afternoon’s festivities.

Hilda, Karen, and I have been friends for almost 32 years. Because of our ridiculous schedules, we don’t get to see each other as often as we’d like to, but when we do, we pick up right where we left off, keepin’ it real and laughing our asses off, and this happy reunion would be another such occasion.

I’ll admit, I got a little weepy thinking about our shared history, and how auspiciously long that history has been. Hilda and Karen have been my friends for more than half of my life, and the longer we live, the more space they will take up in my timeline.

We’ve seen each other through breakups and ridiculous exes, job changes, birthdays, marriages, the death of parents, new homes, weight loss journeys, weight gain journeys, gluten intolerances, personal triumphs, bad hair days, PMS meltdowns, and most of the universal experiences of ordinary life. Still, as important as all those unifying events are, they’re just a part of why thinking about my friendship with Hilda and Karen got me so misty eyed.

These two ineffably beautiful women have witnessed the shittiest version of me evolve into the best versions of me, from the girl who made sure her wounds bled all over everyone else to the woman who made her career and entire life’s mission to staunch the bleeding for others. They walked with me in my darkest days and loved me straight through to the other side.

Ugh, there I go, getting all weepy again.

I wasn’t a complete asshole back then in the early days of our friendship – just deeply unfinished. I did have some redeeming qualities, or else I wouldn’t have been able to maintain their friendship for 30+ years. The majority of my friendships today are long-term, some established even before I met Hilda and Karen, and I’ll get to those another time, but that day my internal Ted Talk was about the two besties I was on my way to share the afternoon with.

As always, Karen was late (it’s part of her charm), but when the three of us were eventually all situated around the granite-top island of Hilda’s fabulous newly designed kitchen, I told them what I had been thinking about on my way over, and we all agreed on one thing – we were so damn lucky to have each other. Lifers, baby!

We laughed over memories from our collective past (like the weekend get-aways to Wildwood) and caught up on the latest developments in our day-to-day lives (like Hilda removing some foliage from her dog’s butt), savoring the kind of indescribable connection that is sculpted and made flawless over decades of friendship.

Hilda and Karen are the kind of friends with whom I can be brazenly vulnerable, and not like the “Whoops, I farted” kind, but rather the “Guys, when I was in the hospital getting my gallbladder out, my poop looked like juiced asparagus for days” kind, and they don’t even blink. It’s the intensity of disclosure that counts.

The three of us have very different and distinctive personalities, but somehow we just fit. Friendships like these don’t just make life survivable – they make it sweeter.  For those of you who have this kind of loving friendship, you know exactly what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t, I sincerely hope you find your own Hilda and Karen someday. Mine are deeply loved and utterly priceless, and will be for the next 32 years.

Then and Now

Grief never enters a room quietly. Sometimes it’s like falling down a flight of stairs, and sometimes it’s like getting hit by a SEPTA bus at 40 mph. Either way, it will kick your ass loudly, and the recovery process depends on the degree of injury and what lingers after the impact.

In my personal life and in my profession, I have become deeply acquainted with the inevitability of grief. It comes in many forms, and doesn’t only show up when a loved one dies. We can also grieve the loss of a marriage or a friendship, a home, a job, an older version of ourselves, a treasured object, or a particular moment in time (I’m looking at you, pre-mobile device era).

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross gave us the Five Stages of Grief, and later her protégé David Kessler added meaning-making as a sixth stage to the original denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance model we’re all too familiar with. While these stages can apply to any form of loss (usually not in order and sometimes all at once), for today’s purpose I’m talking about the SEPTA bus kind: the death of a loved one.

On my first day back to the office after Christmas vacation, within the course of three hours, I learned that the mother of one client and the father of another had passed away. In my work, holding space for grief is an absolute privilege, so on some days, as the gravity of loss hits me all at once, the weight reminds me of just how gloriously human this work is.

You’ll never hear me complain about being a highly empathetic person. Compassion is a gift, one that I try to cultivate every day (usually successfully, but sometimes with an egregious faceplant). Still, it can bump up against my emotional threshold on occasion, so when I heard that not only one, but TWO of my clients had experienced loss on the same evening, the news landed like a prize fighter’s left hook.

Why would I grieve for someone I didn’t know, you ask? Well, first, I’m not an asshole. Watching others suffer hurts my heart. I even get weepy when the kids in a baking competition get eliminated, so in MY world, when someone tells you that their parent just died, empathy is automatically required.  

Secondly, it wasn’t so much that I was grieving the loss of the parents themselves, but rather for two people I sit across from week after week, whose pain I’ve witnessed, stories I know, growth I’ve celebrated, and with whom I’ve built the weirdly comfortable alliance that exists only in the therapy office or confessional booth.

When people I care about are hurting, I feel it with them, not because it overwhelms me, but because connection is part of the healing process. Being a therapist may be my job, but being deliberately human informs how I do it.  

I’m lucky enough to share a space with two of my safe people. Anna (my biz partner), Pam (another therapist friend), and I have offices in the same building, so we usually have lunch together, talking business and letting off steam. The next day at work, I texted Anna with, “I’m very sad,” so she and Pam came to my office to let me unload a bit. As I began talking about the loss my clients had just experienced, I started to cry.

But then, at the most exquisitely precise moment, Anna cracked a joke, and I started to laugh. I don’t remember exactly what she said, probably something about farts, because let’s be honest, even in grief, nothing compares to a well-timed fart joke. She wasn’t being insensitive. She just knew I needed a pause, like the space between words that give them each meaning and allows us to take a breath. I felt much better after that release.

I noticed that the same thing happened when I met with each of my grieving clients that week. They both processed their feelings, of course, and recounted the circumstances of their parents’ deaths, but there were moments when offering a little levity felt natural, and both chose to welcome it. Although those silly interludes wouldn’t take away the gripping pain of loss, somehow, they loosened it just enough to break through the sadness for a while, not to bypass the process, but to create a little room to breathe.

David Kessler said that, “Grief doesn’t always look heavy. Sometimes it laughs. Sometimes it connects us to something beyond words,” and he is so right. As I advance in my own grief and loss pilgrimage, I find that my favorite memories of my departed loved ones are rarely the sad or angry ones, but the ones that make me laugh – the funny stories we retell with relatives on birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays that become written into the family lore. Maybe laughter really is the best medicine – even after you’ve been run over by a speeding bus and have to learn to walk all over again.