Who have been my closest friends throughout the years?

When you’ve moved as much as I have—and moved LONG distances—it’s difficult to look at friendships and say, this person was my closest friend or that.

In terms of longevity, I have two friends I have known for almost 50 years, Susan and Jean. And I have another friend, Jacqui, whom I met about 45 years ago when I worked at McGill University. Finally, I have a friend from my years in England in the mid 1970s, Sheila, who still lives in England. They’re actually the only friendships I still keep up with regularly that date from childhood/early university/England years. And even with them there have been times that we lost contact, times when I was moving too often to keep sending updates on where I was and what I was doing. We caught up later, sometimes years later. But we did catch up and because of that shared history, it wasn’t difficult to catch up, to re-establish the friendship. Only it was on different terms: where it might have been weekly or monthly get togethers, or pen and paper letter writing, now it’s emails and the odd phone call. We live in different countries, a thousand miles apart. We can’t be there for each other in the way we might if we lived near one another and so the friendships change.

Friendships also change as we age, as we have different preoccupations, as we marry, divorce, etc.

There’s no friendship I have with someone who “saw it all” in the moment with me. Instead, during many times, there were friends who were there for that moment, and I was there for theirs. And then we moved on. Some friendships were actually toxic and I am glad that they ended. There were others that ended and I feel sorry we didn’t keep in contact. I sometimes feel a twinge of regret when I hear of some friends I had a close friendship with who still get together for reunions, reunions that, even if were there, I would be odd person out, my experiences through the years so different, different countries, different situations, from people who followed the usual pattern of university, job, marriage, etc. And so I choose not to go; travel and distance have relegated those friendships to the odd Christmas/holiday card, the “best wishes” on Facebook.

And that’s okay. Friendships are there to help us through life and vice versa. We interact with people so that we learn what being “human” really is. As years go by, they help us to remember the good times, reflect on what we’ve survived, commiserate when things get difficult, celebrate successes and happy events, even if it’s at a distance. The idea of friendship is also to help us become the people we want to be; if we do it wisely (and I didn’t always do it wisely), we choose people to be friends with who reflect our values, who encourage us to follow our dreams, who want only the best for us. For the others, well, the rest are acquaintances, a whole different category of relationships.

I am lucky at this stage of my life that I still have that category of friends in my life. It is a rare jewel.