I found out that the father of a childhood friend of mine died last week. He'd been sick for some time, in the hospital, but that doesn't make it any easier. It was weird to hear about it from my mom, who read the death notice in the paper. Of course, this friend wouldn't have contacted me when it happened; we keep in touch now, but I would hardly say we're close friends. It made me think more about the tenuous nature of friendships that spring up in school.
Most of my friends from those times have drifted away. Our only real connection was that of the people we had to see every day, we were the least objectionable to each other. That's not a horrible thing. I had some good friendships in school. It's just that once we weren't being held together by the enforced social structures of school, there wasn't much for the friendship to fall back on.
My more lasting friendships have come from more personal connections, like people I met because they have interests in common with me. With those friends, I have a reason to call and find out how things are going. We have something to talk about or do when we see each other. We have other friends in common who we can gossip about, too, and developments in our common area of interest. We seek each other out because we want to.
I'm also really horrible as a correspondant, so I tend to stay friends with people who don't take offsense when I fall off the planet for a while, who will still call me and see what I'm up to, even if I haven't talked to them in a while. This was not always the case with me, but it's certainly been that way for a while, now. I don't really have the energy to have a lot of high-intensity friendships, anyway. Even though I'm not taking a full courseload this semester.
Unfortunately, this is the third friend in the last ten months to lose a parent. I'm not sure what it is about this year, but I can't say I like it. It's certainly not as interesting as The Year Everybody Got Married, or The Year Everybody Had A Baby. It reminds me too much of The Year Everybody Died From Terminal Illness. So if the surviving parents of my friends would not mind, I'm calling a moratorium on deaths for a while. Thanks.
