What we lose when we lose close friends

A good coffee cruise this morning, brooding about this topic and another. As I've said here so often, because it defines and begins a new period in my journey, I've out-lived my closest male friends. Two, in particular, are important, Dick and Ger, because they in turn defined two earlier periods of my life, the beginnings of my life as an adult and as a professional playwright. I shared experiences with Dick for almost half a century and with Ger for almost a quarter.

You can't replace shared experience like this. You can't replace how well you get to know someone and they you. With this background, a good deal of communication becomes non-verbal. Dick and I, with the same sense of humor, and a sense of the absurdity of life in our culture, used to crack up together as if rehearsed over the smallest, most subtle moment of cultural absurdity. People around us thought we were nuts, or perhaps enjoying a pass out of the asylum. Laughing with Dick is something I miss terribly.

Ger and I were closer "professionally" because Ger had been an actor in SF before deciding to make a living as a banker. We talked a lot about theater at the time, the 80s, when my career was at its most visible peak of success. We had similar theater tastes and enjoyed sharing what we liked and didn't like on the current scene. There was more of the latter than the former.

But much more than camaraderie is missed when you lose a close friend. Dick's loss, which came first, was lessened because I still had Ger to hang with. Interestingly, Dick and Ger couldn't get along, but Ger kindly listened to my laments and grief after Dick died. But when Ger passed, there was no one else -- and that's when I felt the loss of friendship the most. It's a feeling of being alone on the journey. That's how I define the new period of my life: okay, now I'm alone for the duration. Sure, I have friends and acquaintances, I have a wife, but I don't have those long shared experiences on which so much non-verbal communication is built, I don't have the strong sense of not being alone on this journey through life's puzzle. As an existentialist, I've always believed in the fundamental condition of loneliness in the human condition but it was tempered considerably, in terms of living this experience, by the shared minds of Dick and Ger, who agreed with this existential assessment, and by sharing it somewhat negated it. But the compromise is gone now.

What we lose when we lose close friends is a bridge over the abyss.