When my wife’s cancer spread and she became sicker, my long time friends and my mom did something I hadn’t expected. They started to call me every few days instead of our usual “once a month” check ins.
After my wife died and my world fell apart, they called me everyday. Sometimes they’d call me twice a day. We would talk for hours about everything and nothing – just like Ellen and I used to talk to each other.
After a few weeks, the calls didn’t stop. When I sold my house, the calls didn’t stop. When I went on the road, the calls didn’t stop.
They carried me through the grieving process until I could carry myself.
I didn’t stop thinking “I might as well be dead” until recently. It’s probably no coincidence that it was right around the same time that my friend’s calls diminished to a more reasonable level.
I had been through my trial and was starting to rebuild. I would be OK. Now they could focus on helping other people or taking care of their own lives.
At times I’ve gone weeks or months and in one case years without speaking to my friends. I never thought we’d reconnect the way we have this past year.
We will probably drift apart again as life pulls us all in different directions. Even now, I am starting to talk less about my day to day stuff with them because I realize it is just mundane stuff that I want to talk about. There’s no reason to subject them to listening to it.
They would listen, if I asked. They did listen to it, when I desperately needed someone to listen. But I’m not desperate now, so I can relieve them of this burden.
My wife once told me that she felt like married people fell in and out of love with each other over and over throughout the course of a long marriage. She thought this was perfectly natural. When she told me, we had only been together for a few months and I was head over heels in love with her. I thought this idea was sad. I felt like we would never “fall in and out of love”.
But during our three decades together I saw that she was right. Our marriage, like my friendships, had ebbs and flows that were perfectly natural.
And this is all OK.