Death and friendship

On Friday evening my sister telephoned to say that one of our childhood friends had died. He was my age.

We had not kept in touch. Whole decades of his life were a mystery to me. Now gone.

I am fascinated to discover how life has turned out for those with whom I grew up, went to school, studied or worked. Why will two lives rooted in the same soil grow so differently? Why – given a shared start – did their life take that turning; mine another? 

And then the phone rings. In the midst of life, we are in death.

It seems to me that life holds very few deep friendships. We overlap briefly, owing to shared time, location or circumstance.

Not knowing quite what to think about William’s death and how to react, I was glad of an opportunity yesterday to spend the morning helping more recent friends to move house. We shared the morning disassembling furniture, filling the van and then bringing a first load round to the new home. Five hours where time was spent purposefully together in a shared space; a finite time counting far more than a shallow and casual acquaintanceship.

Then, for the afternoon and early evening, some time spent with a group of friends with whom we had shared a journey of 28 years: reminding, listening and dusting off old jokes. Telling heartrending stories of what had happened since we last met but knowing that, despite the pain, the stories are safer in the telling.

Some were there who had lost touch with us and now promised to come soon to have fish and chip suppers with us in Southend. And for us to visit them – making that slight detour from the A1 that we had always promised to whenever passing. 

This was a time to note with much pleasure that, for the Cranbrook family, at last ‘the lines had fallen for them in pleasant places’ as it says in Psalm 16. I saw the next stage in the mending of broken things beyond, perhaps, what I had thought possible.

“Life is made up of meetings and partings. People come into your life everyday, you say good morning, you say good evening, some stay for a few minutes, some stay for a few months, some a year, others a whole lifetime. No matter who it is, you meet and then you part.”

Important, then, to be mindful of the people in our lives who matter most. For all times seem short when they have gone.