Friends and Strangers

“Grief makes friends into strangers and strangers into friends.”

Someone told me this a few days ago, and I momentarily dismissed it as just one of those clever turns-of-phrase. You know, bumpersticker wisdom. And then, boom. Oh yesyesyes. That’s what’s been happening these past four months.A friend--well, not just “a” friend, but a person I had long considered the closest of confidants, a sister from another mother--vanished from my life. Another friend, someone who had long depended on me for emotional support, disappeared. A woman I reached out to who had been part of my life for more than twenty years, never returned my call. Tom’s best buddy, a person I knew well and had spent considerable time with over more than a decade, never reached out.But at the same time, a casual friend, more an associate than friend, dropped what she was doing and drove an hour and half to sit and have coffee with me. Three times in two weeks. A woman I spent two days with six years ago found one of my photographs on Facebook, made a painting of it, and sent it to me. A woman with whom I had a deeply fractured friendship reappeared. A high school acquaintance whom I had seen once in a godzillion years five years ago, sent me the loveliest of books. One of Tom’s friends, a man I had met only once, has been calling me every week just to check in.I related these experiences to the friends-into-strangers-strangers-into-friends woman. She is a hospice worker and has seen a lot of grief. Some people just know, she said. They know what to say or not say, what to do. They are not afraid to get close to grief. They just lean in because that’s who they are.And some people don’t know what to do, she said, or what to say. Or it is just too scary or painful for them to reach out. They have their own issues. (Who doesn’t?) They don’t want to have a conversation about death because, well, we don’t know how to have conversations about death. Talking about it makes it too real. Talking about it slams us upside the head with our own mortality. When friends disappear, don’t take it personally, she told me. (Of course I do.)In fact, listen up, friends and strangers and everyone in between: I don’t know what to do either. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I need until it appears. I’m just making it up as I go along.