friendiversary

In two hours, I will collect my pal Tamara from Dublin airport. She’s flying in from the UK to spend the weekend with me.

I wonder if she can remember the day when we first became friends.

I cannot. I do, however, recall telling another friend from work, when that person came to lunch at the house where I lived in 1999, that I was going to make the new girl in the office, Tamara, my friend. The idea of making someone your friend seems very schoolyard and, even then, not exactly how I was at school. It amuses me still that I decided I must somehow claim her.

Within some months, Tamara and I did become buddies.

Last week, someone I have known even longer than Tamara sent me a WhatsApp message with an image of a pay slip. Found this! That friend wrote. A record of our friendship. Next year, it will be thirty years. She wondered if we might do something to celebrate our friendiversary.

As a regular celebrator of friendship, I’m surprised that it has never occurred to me to mark friendiversaries. I hadn’t even heard the term before last week’s text.

Calculating the date demands a pause.

• Tracing the history of knowing someone back to a moment.
• Considering the phases of your life this relationship has passed through.
• And the ways in which a friendship can prise hard bits of you, expanding what you become capable of.

The poet David Whyte says, “Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding, not only of the self and the other, but also of a possible and as yet unlived future.”

Sometimes a friendship, especially one with considerable heft under its belt, topples over. Both parties point at the unfortunate incident clinging to a different tale of how it happened. Will these Fallen-Friends one day grow large enough to stand up and brush off an old trouble with lighter hands?

The second part of the word anniversary stems from the Latin vertere: to turn, transform, translate, to be changed.

A repaired friendship, one retrieved from its unhappy pieces, can withstand more than the harmoniously untested. Like Kintsugi, the Japanese craft of mending a broken vase with golden joinery.

The first years of my friendship with Tamara mimicked a tumultuousness that bordered on sit-com. Where I introvert, she does not. An enthusiastically Canadian soul, she did not blend quietly into the office. She has a face so expressive, so free of mask, that hopefully you haven’t just told her something sensitive about the person walking towards you.

Add in the pressure of the workplace and the mix of our personalities could come to a boil. Last year Tamara told me that on one occasion, back in these early years, she called her mother in Vancouver, sobbing about a big fight she and I had. Which made me love her even more. That being exactly what I would do. Both of us the sorts of daughters who regard our mothers as our most viable confidante and supporter, perhaps the only friendship in life with no horizon of affection.

David Whyte writes about that too – the presence of friendship in every kind of relation: “Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationships: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love, and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.”

When an interrupted friendship fails to resume, it composts into memories. These ghosts require befriending. It doesn’t help, not in the end, to belittle what once was treasured. Some pairings do not possess the alchemy to carry both people through their lifetimes. And as my friend Amy Elizabeth Fox explains, “anything we see in another that is not beauty, is pain and trauma.” So, we try not to personalize what can seem so wildly and entirely personal – philosophically an easier assignment than it is psychologically.

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Long before she became a mother, Tamara mothered vigorously. She worried after you, hovered over your shoulder, fed you soups and pills.  Her favourite language of love, though, required shopping. A great showerer of gifts, I believe she owns a sizeable gift closet.

It was with alarm that one day I saw her slip past my desk, attempt to sneak down the corridor (we cannot accuse Tamara of stealth) with her coat on and large handbag tossed over her shoulder. I caught her throwing a look at my then-boss, a Scotsman, who quickly stood, threw on his Macintosh, and followed her. It was my birthday. She’d arranged to take him shopping. His sole idea a posh pen – already enough to embarrass me, she allowed him that, but then guided him through the Burlington Arcade, handing him a bouquet, then a box of chocolates, before steering him to my favourite bookshop to procure a generous voucher.

This weekend, I will ask Tamara if she can recall the day our lives decided to entwine.

“The dynamic of friendship is always underestimated as a constant force in human life.” David Whyte

The word friend comes from the Old English: one who loves …
Also the one who likes, respects, and frees (from slavery).

After breath, after water, food, and shelter – friendship is our next essential. In all its forms, it is the purpose of our life. 

Yet, it’s also true that there will be someone who will read this post and rather than list the friendiversaries they might celebrate, find themselves confronted with that kryptonite called loneliness.

People who outlive their friends.

People who struggle to connect at the level where friendship becomes inescapable.

People stuck in crevices of an existence where it’s tricky for connection to find a path.

This predicament sends me again to David Whyte’s book Consolations, where he tells us that despair is the last bastion of hope. That despair must be accepted for what it is, but not held onto past its time. Despair illuminates “a binding understanding between human beings, where half our experience is mediated by loss.”  But despair is only “a season, a waveform passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us. And a season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.”

My wish would be that the friendless turn to the poets and the plants for companionship. That they become the friendship needed – enveloping themselves in the tenderest of care, soaking up kindness from strangers, readying themselves to befriend again. For certain, there is always someone somewhere who hopes to make you their friend.

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