A Toast to an Old Friend

I’m newly married. As you might expect, this means I’m making changes in my life. This morning I began to work on selling my vacation home in the San Juan Islands, a home I built more than twenty-five years ago. It’s a beautiful place, surrounded by tall trees, where my family and I spent many joyful days.

Michael is the general contractor who built my Friday Harbor home and has helped to maintain it ever since.  Over the years we’ve become good friends, sharing our life experiences, our hopes, our disappointments.  Whenever we are both on the island we visit and have dinner together. We have watched each other’s children grow up.  We have moved from being active in our respective businesses, working sixty hours a week, to wanting to slow down a bit (though neither of us has entirely managed that yet).

Today I called Michael to discuss the house but then, as often happens, our conversation turned elsewhere. As we talked I began to feel sad, but not about parting with my home away from home.  I’m not sad about no longer visiting the San Juan Islands with my family.  We will see each other somewhere else.  I’m sad about leaving behind the friend I’ve known for so many years.

It might seem strange, but sadness is one of my favorite emotions.  Sadness is deep, and it invites intimacy.  When I’m sad my barriers come down and I can gratefully accept comfort and support from those to whom I feel close.  That’s a very good thing.

Years ago I coined a phrase, “Life is loss.”  That’s not meant as a downer.  I know that life is often about what we gain – new friends, new experiences, new abilities. But ultimately our friends move away, our memories fade, and our abilities change and disappear.  That’s sad, but to me it isn’t unhappy.

Where do I go from here?  I just don’t think I’d be getting up there very often, so I’m planning to sell the house Michael built, largely with his own hands, so many years ago.

I’m sure that Michael and I will share a final dinner, toast to our friendship, and promise to stay in touch.  You know how that goes.  We’ll really mean it. But will we ever get together again?  I’ll cling, for a while, to the idea that it’s possible, even though, in my experience, a distance of almost a thousand miles is seldom overcome.

I had close friends in high school, and I’ve enjoyed previous intimate relationships, all now consigned to the twilight of nostalgia.  My life, every life, at some point changes irrevocably, as it did for my grandparents when they boarded a ship in Europe, more than one hundred years ago, leaving everything and everyone they loved behind, to begin a new life in New York.

Contemplating the changes I’m making in my own life, I already feel an emptiness in my heart, which I know will be filled by my new marriage, discoveries to come, friends I will meet. But I can never replace the memory of Michael and our building a home in the woods, our talks, our solving problems together. In a library Michael recently read my blog on hiking.  He laughed out loud and received a stern look from the librarian. Another memory we share.

So this morning I raise an imaginary glass to the past, good times, and to a very dear friend who may soon be found in the mist of what has been.

Alan