Last March, I sat at my aunt’s dining room table flipping through photo albums with my grandmother. Her short-term memory was declining, but she narrated the distant past in detail: prom night, a class field trip, church Sundays.
She paused on a photograph from her wedding day, drumming her finger on one of the two bridesmaids standing beside her. “That’s Rita,” she said, a heaviness in her voice. “I called her up one day and asked why I hadn’t heard from her in a long time.” Rita told her, “You’re married now. We don’t have anything in common.”
They never spoke again.
The story haunted me for weeks. Screw Rita! How dare she break my grandmother’s heart. But secretly, I empathized. No matter how supportive you may be, watching your best friend begin a new life without you can still feel like a betrayal. A kind of death.
And I think we need to start grieving those friendships appropriately.
Over the past three years, I’ve experienced many mini deaths. For all of the think pieces and panic about how millennials are forgoing homes, and marriages, and babies, I’ve watched nearly all of my own thirty-something friends transition seamlessly into suburban family life. Dog, wedding, baby, house — they keep spinning ‘round the carousel, and I’m watching from below. Every once in a while, someone nudges me, “Get in line,” but I don’t want to get on the ride.
I know how Rita must have felt watching her own best friend leave her behind: sad, isolated, worried about the future. Friendships — female friendships in particular — are already so delicate, and often fraught. Stick a husband, a few kids, and a few miles between you, and it’s incredible that any non-familial relationship survives.
But these are the feelings that you can’t say out loud, in fear they may be mistaken for bitterness, narcissism, or worst of all, envy.
Can’t I feel happy and sad all at once? Can’t I celebrate milestones, and mourn the friendship that is inevitably lost? Can you believe that I, in fact, love my single life, and still wish I had more single girlfriends to navigate it by my side?
Maybe it’s time we start acknowledging these contradictions and memorializing the friendships that were, in order to make room for the new kinds of friendships that will be: If I were to design a wedding card from one girlfriend to another, it might say, “Congratulations!” on the outside. And on the inside? “I’ll miss you.”
Maybe Rita’s bridesmaid speech could have gone something like this:
My dearest friend Josephine, it warms my heart to see you so happy next to Jimmy, your childhood sweetheart, and now, loving husband. I wish you both decades of good health, love, joy, and endless adventures together.
As you begin this journey, I’d also like to take a moment to say “goodbye” to a chapter in the book of you and me. This isn’t the end of our friendship, but it is the end, perhaps, of a certain kind of closeness – of daily phone calls, porch visits, and Saturday night debauchery. Maybe we will have less in common in the years ahead, and that scares me, admittedly. But I hope that we can create new traditions and memories, and transition into a new kind of friendship.
No matter what, I love you, and I support you. Always.
Anyway, I’d like to think that my grandmom and Rita have reconnected in the afterlife; that they’re catching up on the last 65 years, laughing and playing cards, for old time’s sake. Life’s too long to go through without a Josie by your side.
Girlfriends, Interrupted
❤️ Aunt Josie!