Friendship

We met as four strangers huddled under the same awning in a hailstorm, at the most vulnerable moment in our lives. We clung to each other as we began the tortuous process of trying, first to understand, then to imagine. And finally, we began the journey one foot in front of the other, treading together, holding each other’s hands, blindly and barefoot, through the broken-glass-strewn trail, most call grief. Though we insist it deserves a name of its own. A name that honors the person we lost as well as the version of us we are no longer.

Our friendship, born of this singular tragedy, allowed the bond to grow through the sharing of our fears, through showers of our tears, through wine-evoked laughter, and through an openness that surprised each of us as much as it surprised family and friends. Our conversations ranged from the ridiculous to the deeply intimate. We trusted one another. We were kind, giving comfort. We felt safe.

Now, in the light of day, with the hailstorm in the distance, and with hard-fought experience navigating the still palpable, ever-present lost-our-one-true-love grief, we strangers now have history of our own. The friendship that once depended on our chance meeting rests instead on our shared lived experience.

We celebrated the forming of the four. We held it up as if it were a pearl formed within an oyster, in awe and amazement that something so beautiful could emerge from the darkest moments of our lives.

But now we have more than the oddity of our four-ness. We have developed friendships because of who we are. Some of us dance together. Some of us dine together. And sometimes all or a fraction of the four of us gather at theaters where dancers leap perilously into the air, only to be caught safely and gently lowered to the ground.

The fact that we were four is less important than the bonds each of us has formed.

One measure of a friendship is that one holds the other’s wellbeing in mind, and that one trusts the other with their openness and vulnerability. Another is the ability over time to forgive and repair when things go awry. At the end of the day, there must be mutual respect and shared value in friendship to make it worth the having.

No matter the future, one must treasure the arms that caught us when we fell, the milestones we would gather to endure and the laughter that we shared. The closeness we developed holding each other as best we could, ever grateful that we found each other when we did.