Holes in the Tapestry

Our friends who pass away are irreplaceable.

About 15 years ago, my friend Marite invited me to join her for a visit to the Butterfly Conservatory at the Natural History Museum in New York. I’ve never forgotten it. Being in that hot, humid space surrounded by some of Nature’s most enchanting creatures almost made a lepidopterist out of me. But there’s another reason why our visit was unforgettable.

Marite wasn’t the kind of girly-girl who would typically fawn over butterflies, rainbows, or baby animals. She was a tech troubleshooter by trade. Her apartment was a mini-laboratory full of computer components and computers in various states of disrepair. Some of them had been dropped off by her clients, who had thrown up their hands in desperation when their screens went dark or their files went missing.

After our excursion to the Butterfly Conservatory, though, I concluded that she was a girly-girl underneath. Rarely have I seen such pure delight on an adult’s face as I witnessed that day. You’d have sworn she was 5, not 65.

Since then, I’ve returned to that enchanted place only once—but it wasn’t the same without Marite. My enthusiasm for the museum’s butterfly emporium was pale and occasional, while hers was red-blooded and overflowing.

Marite was among the first of my friends to die. Then came more losses in rapid succession. Bennie. Sheryl. Bill. Joanne. Fred. Danny.

So what do you do in the wake of so many deaths? Plug in the holes where your very specific friends once were? Who or what do you plug them with? New friends, maybe?

Obviously, it doesn’t work that way.

One of life’s great contradictions is that each of us is simultaneously puny—one among billions—and utterly unique and irreplaceable.

As a freelance writer, I can be found holed up at my desk on most days, toiling away on blog and feature articles about health, medicine, science, and ageing, so it’s critically important for me to escape from my apartment now and then and meet new people. Making new friends at every age is a good idea.

But no one will ever replace Danny, a gentle, soft-spoken fellow I bonded with back in the early 1990s. Every Christmas, we’d go to the Candlelight Carol Service at Riverside Church. We also delighted in each other’s company over dinner at local eateries, and we were deeply compatible culture vultures, attending myriad concerts, exhibits, plays, and lectures over the years.

I’d also confide in Danny when my mood plummeted, which it tends to do on occasion, and his classic response was: “This too shall pass.” Hardly an original statement, I realize, but his voice transformed cliché into consolation. A voice that drove the message home by dint of its velvety quality, slow delivery, and sincere intent.

Nor can anyone replace Bennie, short for Benigna—a friend from college. She was the daughter of a seamstress and a factory worker from Abruzzi and a first-generation American. She adored languages and literature, and she taught these subjects in Philadelphia’s public school system.

Bennie died quite suddenly in 2013. A heart attack, her daughter told me. No, wait, I was planning to come for a visit. Would it have been so hard for me to hop on a train to Philly? That’s all it would have taken to nurture the friendship and be nurtured by it in turn. I failed utterly to do that, and my life is the poorer for it.

Let me conclude with a short tribute to one more beloved friend: my cousin Sheryl, who left this earth in 2012.

I confess that when we were young, I found her a bit quirky for my taste. You never knew what she’d come up with in conversation, and I didn’t quite trust her.

That would change in the year before her death from pancreatic cancer. On a memorable occasion, the two of us took a long walk on the beach in Assateague, Virginia, near her family’s vacation home in Chincoteague. We spoke about my relationship with a difficult, dysfunctional man. We spoke about our children, and we shared memories—some quite painful—of our parents. Their judgmental attitudes and their intolerance. Their snobbery. Their small cruelties.

She turned to me with her wide eyes, full of soulful insight, one foot in the sand and the other in a place I can only imagine as eternity, and said, “We need to accept each other.” And by “we,” she meant all of us.

In death as in life, the friends I’ve lost continue to comfort me, advise me, and in some mysterious way, keep me company. They mitigate my loneliness, and they continue to prepare me for what’s next.

Yet here I am, still alive and kicking and ready to open my heart to my friends who are still here and to those I have yet to meet.