A Good Friend Died
A good friend died this week. I had known him since I first came to this country 45 years ago. I will always remember how welcoming he was, his optimism and vitality. He let me be myself, without fear of criticism, and encouraged me to just go and do my own thing. He gave me financial support and helped me to prosper. But he was not doing so well. I don't know when things started to go downhill for him--I wasn't paying attention. But it's obvious now that there was something not right in his life, something that began to gnaw away at him. Looking back, I should have noticed how his optimism was failing, how his willingness to accept ideas was declining. We still had so much in common, so many fundamental values that we shared, but he began to be less interested in the things that I worried about--changes in the environment, global warming, extinction of species--and he withdrew into thinking about his more immediate concerns, things that affected him directly, here and now. I had no clue how deep the wounds were. He began to lash out, angrily and in ways that seemed irrational to me, but I put this down to a short-term malady that he'd get over. But he didn't get over it, and towards the end it became his consuming passion. I wasn't able to reach him--he'd stopped listening, and didn't want to talk. No matter how much I tried to reason with him, and persuade him that there were things out there that were just too important to ignore, he was not interested. Perhaps if I had paid more attention to his worries, recognized his symptoms and tried to do something to help, things would have been different, but I'm not sure what I could have done. Still, I should have been listening, and I wasn't, and now it's too late.
On November 8th, a good friend died. Or at least, it feels like he did.