Loosing Friends As You Get Old

I am seventy-five now. The end of life losses are beginning to hit home. First was my husband. I thought I wouldn’t survive that one. He was literally my other half. His absence felt like standing next to an abyss. Connections that had been central to our lives together dropped away. My identity as his wife, the wife of a Professor, disappeared. I was floundering. Who was I and where was my place in the larger social context.

Now, seven years later I’ve managed to establish some sort of equilibrium. I’ve created a single life that is comfortable. I am at ease with myself. I think I would find it distasteful to have to accommodate to another persons wishes and decisions.

It has been a process. It was very unnerving to make my own decisions, with out consultation, and know I would have to live alone with the consequences.

The losses have continued. Old friends have died. One disappeared into dementia. And now a new ogre has appeared on the horizon, disengagement through personality change.

Yesterday at lunch I was discussing it with my friend Eugenia. “Some people get angry about getting old. My oldest friend isn’t speaking to me because I support Barack Obama. She thinks he is anti-Semitic and doesn’t support Israel.” I had been discussing it in the context of the loss of one of my old friends who has decided I am “rude” and “parsimonious”. I had been at a loss to explain her anger with me, which had grown and become more intense over a five-year period. When I finally confronted her I got a letter with a long list of my sins of omission and commission going back years. “That is crazy and obsessive.” Said Eugenia.

I had been trying to argue her out of her anger with me. This is the second episode so I think I will give up and let her go. It is a new variety of loss.