The Friendship Fade

Someone I have known for many years will not answer my emails or return my phone calls. Even my heartfelt, hand-written note on Crane stationery did not draw a reaction. Being my friend on Facebook? Forget about it. I offended her, unintentionally, and I suspect she has decided I do not deserve a response. I can only “suspect” at this point because she’s not speaking to me.

I didn’t mean to neglect this person, didn’t fathom that I would let more than a year pass before reaching out to invite her and her new husband and children over for dinner after they moved to a neighboring county. She and I haven’t lived in the same area since our college days, back in the mid-1980s, and I am more likely to think of her wandering Greenwich Village or hiking Arizona — places she once called home — than I am to picture her in Middle Tennessee.

Part of me wants to explain to her how busy I’ve been with work, and step-parenting, and taking monthly trips to Mississippi to spend time with my 87-year-old mother. With life. Another part of me wants to admit that the days pass more quickly for me now that I am middle-aged.

Just last week I asked my sister, “Are you sure Aunt Myra died three years ago? I thought she passed just last winter.” The teeny-tiniest part of me — the snide and snarky part of which I am not proud — wants to cry out, “Doesn’t 25-plus years of friendship afford me a second chance?” But the biggest part of me just wants to be forgiven.

I don’t have an exotic excuse to appease my friend. I didn’t suffer a personal tragedy or get a new job in Des Moines that required me to relocate in the middle of the night. I simply forgot. I forgot to do what I should have done, what I wanted to do, what I meant to do. Now I’ve remembered, and apparently it’s too late.

“Sometimes we demand more of ourselves and others than either we or they are able to deliver,” says Forrest Church in Life Lines: Holding on (and Letting Go) (Beacon Press). “Harsh judgments, both inner criticism and criticism directed at our neighbors, estrange us from our source of connection. Jealousy, anger, bitterness, disappointment, fear of intimacy, failure — all the pains that accompany any human relationship — can cut us off from sources of comfort and strength.”

Growing older is doing a lot of good things for me. One thing Young Amy Lyles did that Older Amy Lyles tries not to do is mandate strict rules of conduct for everyone within a 10-mile radius of my finely tuned moral compass. Back in the day I might dismiss you out of hand for an action I deemed inappropriate or a misstep I considered avoidable. (Aren’t you glad you didn’t know me then?)

Today I strive to be more realistic about what people can and can’t do, what might be expected of them. It took me a while, but I finally realized you can never know what someone else is going through, or dealing with, or thinking about, or wishing for, or running from. Not unless you take the time to ask her, to let her tell her side of the story. And even then you can’t know for sure how you might react in a similar situation.
As I find myself creeping toward age 50, “I would never in all my born days … ” has morphed into “I don’t know what I might do … ” An oft-repeated “Can you believe she did that?” has been replaced with “I wonder what might be going on in her life to cause her to act that way.” I try harder to treat others with the same understanding and compassion that I would like them to show me. (Insert your own version of The Golden Rule here.)

In short, it’s been life changing for me to lighten up a tad. Life is hard enough without my making unreasonable demands on the people around me, whether I’ve just met them or I’ve known them for decades.

I want only the best for my old friend. I hope she is happy and healthy and enjoying her family and her career. If I ever get the chance, I’ll tell her so. In the meantime, maybe I’ll try to forgive myself.