This has been a bad week from the standpoint of losing friends. Two friends of roughly similar age have died from heart related illnesses, one from my high school years and one whom I met as a fully grown adult. Neither death is startling, since both men suffered from heart disease for significant periods of time. In fact, one of them had a pacemaker and was in the hospital dealing with the effect of the device’s failure when he died.
I can, through hindsight, recognize some inevitability in their early deaths. Perhaps I should have recognized that inevitability sooner, for it is the missed opportunities at the intersections of our lives that troubles me the most. Ten days ago the friend with the pacemaker left me a voice mail suggesting that we hadn’t spoken for a while and he would love to catch up. As I was in the middle of a project, I decided to wait to call him back until a more auspicious moment – a moment that now will never come.
As to my other friend, we became reacquainted when a mutual friend came to town a couple of years ago and we held a mini-reunion of six high school friends. He called me a few weeks later and suggested a one-on-one lunch at a neighborhood sort-of-dive which I pass each night on my way home. It was the first of too few, and in each we spoke of many topics of mutual interest wholly unrelated to our high school experiences. Until I learned of his death, I would often look for his truck in the dive’s parking lot to determine if he might be in residence as part of my nightly ritual. Of late, I had been thinking it was time to arrange another lunch date, a luncheon that will now remain forever aspirational.
Of course, there is nothing new to the notion that the living regret not having had one more chance to speak with someone recently dead, but I have to admit that the digital age has taken that regret to new levels. For I can still play the voice mail my pacemakered friend left me and listen to his voice suggesting it is time to catch up. For as long as I choose to keep that voice mail on my computer, I will be reminded of the stutter step that caused me to miss our final chance for a connection.
In truth, however, the real regret I feel about their deaths is not over missed opportunities for one last communication with one another. For if I had enjoyed a “last” communication with either, there would have been yet another potential conversation that wouldn’t have occurred, for the last possible chance in any sequence depends not upon my volition but upon the termination of the potentialities that allowed the sequence to happen.
My regret is deeper.
I have learned over the years that experiences, reading, and friends and acquaintances have added the most content to my life. Experience comes in many forms (travel, life-critical times, schooling, work related opportunities, birth and death, and the like) and is often shared, but in each instance it has been my personal interaction with the scope and depth of the experience that has defined its personal value and meaning. And reading is inherently solitary, even if it can take me far beyond my daily world to places not even of this universe.
Friends and acquaintances have added the most intimate and deepest dimensions to my life. They accomplished this through conversations held at all hours of the day or night and by means of shared dreams, and the loss of even one friend or acquaintance, however major or minor he or she might have been in the panoply of my friendships, means that my ability to converse and dream has been diminished in direct proportion to his or her involvement in my life. And each such loss, regardless of its seeming importance or relevance, is, quite simply, an impoverishment of the riches I previously enjoyed.
While I recognize the note of selfishness this last statement seemingly implies, I have to believe that I, in turn, added some measurable dimension to each of their lives. My faith in this belief lies in the continued existence of a certain down-at-heels neighborhood dive and a voice mail reaching out for one more chance to share recorded before the sequential possibilities had fully run their course.
