Losing friends

Friends are the most important thing in life, more valuable than money, more significant than social status, more rewarding than any award. And I say this having been blessed to have many good friends. Not nice acquaintances you understand, but real friends, people who care about me as much as I care about them... wonderful!

How careless, then, you might think, to lose your friends - how could you do it? Did you misplace them? Did you argue, scream and shout at each other, then walk off in different directions never to meet again?

Alas no, the loss I have in mind is more permanent, final, and something that sooner or later comes to us all: death. Friends can be here today but gone tomorrow; with their passing we lose not only their presence and all the nice moments we were  to spend with them, but also lots of the shared moments in our mutual past. No more 'remember when we...', no more talk about those special moments of the, sometimes very distant, past. Suddenly these either retreat to our memory, to be brought to the front of our mind on occasion, or to the shared memory of third parties that were also there and subtly different.

Life is full of loss and the, usually painful, feelings that go with it. We are predestined to lose family - remember your grandparents? - members, friends and acquaintances before we too disappear, to be remembered for a while at least in writings, photographs, our tombstone. And if with every loss there are feelings of absence, regret, helplessness, disappointment, emptiness, these may be tempered by relief or heightened by fury, depending on the circumstances.

I'm now at an age when it is expected that my immediate friends will start popping off naturally sooner rather than later, but this does not make it easier, nor does their absence become any less heartfelt for it. All of them, in one way or another, blessed my life with their presence and warmth. But the recent loss of my lovely friend Nick is particularly painful, as for most of 2016 I lived under his and Jen's (his wife) roof and spent a big part of my days and nights with him. In the process we discovered that our friendship, mutual respect and affection was even stronger than we thought, and that we wanted this to continue for a long time to come. It was not to be.

There is more sadness ahead, I know, to balance or overwhelm what's gone before; I hope that I will have the courage to deal with it and the wisdom to accept it and be grateful to have been so blessed, as there are people who go through life with few if any friends. And there is always the wine...