Dealing with loss is something everyone has a hard time with. While everyone has their own way of grieving and mourning, there are social etiquettes to follow when you go through a break-up, loss of a loved one, or even moving-on from jobs and being separated from colleagues. We know what to do, there is a pattern to the grieving and there is advice on every corner: books, people, blogs etc. While it is an incredibly difficult time dealing with such losses, and nothing can prepare us to face such situations, these are also the things for which we have a wide variety of resources to help us cope in trying circumstances.
But there are no such handbooks on losing friends. There are no templates to follow, no guidelines to toe, and no rituals to express grief. Like embers of a dying fire, this loss just burns bright enough for us to notice sometimes, but soon it fades to black, receding into the dark corners of our minds. It is ironic considering how important we think our friends are in our lives, we let go and have been let go far too easily. We lose touch and then as time passes, our conversations or attempts to maintain the friendship seem fruitless and futile. The jokes and comments seem frozen in time, evidence of the shadow of the people who we used to be. We seemed to have moved on, but our relationship did not, and now it begins to feel eerily like that Gotye song.
Loss, in general, has a tendency to come into our lives like a perfect storm, leaving our older, less wiser personality in its wake, while we come out of it scarred but having learnt some lessons. It is a painful, prolonged process and we are often acutely aware of the discomfort and sadness we are experiencing. However, losing friends is not like that. It is a slow process, where two people drift apart, despite the best of intentions. Day-by-day there are not a lot of changes, we might think; but soon it’s been years and everything is different. It becomes really hard to put a finger to what actually went wrong, which makes it even more difficult to rationalise this loss.
“Maybe we are different people now and want different things?” ”Maybe we should have made the effort to stay in touch and gotten to know each other as the river of time flowed silently?“ ”Maybe being in physical proximity would have helped, as we now live in different timezones?”
There are a thousand ways to think about this, and none would seem to answer why we lost a friend.
While we value the role friends play in our life, I think we do not value their contribution in shaping us enough. Whether long-standing or ephemeral, there are uncountable number of “friendships” in my life, and have each contributed to shaping my personality. My music preferences, the sports I play and the teams I support are all a function of the influence my friends have had on me. The books I read, the movies I’ve seen and the food and restaurants I like are all factors of the people I interacted with and who left an indelible impression in a subliminal way that is now part of who I am now. My tastes and preferences are not my own. The uniqueness of my personality or what makes me “me” is just a mosaic of everyone I ever cared about or interacted with.
When I think about all the friends I have lost, I have this feeling that can be best described as a lingering sadness, a pain that just is, and often gets buried underneath other feelings and only comes back up when I want to notice it. It does not affect anything, but makes me reminisce; A shared history, that will slowly fade with time. And for each of these memories, I have a thousand other memories that have been written over by the passage of time: faces that I don’t remember and details that I have forgotten. There are no obituaries here; no epitaphs in this cemetery of lost friendships. Just the soundless flow of the river of time.
