Counting the Missing: High School Reunions

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It’s that time of year for high school reunions. Maybe you’ve been invited to one this summer. Maybe, like me, you’re in between reunions.

Some people are afraid to go, afraid to face the people they knew so long ago. They obsess about their weight, their jobs, their accomplishments, and often wind up talking themselves out of going. Others have only bad memories and are left with no desire to make new ones. Some look forward to the opportunity to reconnect, take stock, and, let’s admit it, brag.

Sometime after the 20^th, when most people are focused on bragging, the mood shifts. We spend less time talking about ourselves, and more time catching up with people we only seem to see at these events. And that, too, is when we start keeping count of who’s no longer there.

My class was small: we graduated 122 girls. Forty-two years later, we’ve only lost touch with a handful.

Nine have died: cancer, suicide, anorexia, car accidents, 9/11.

We keep in closer touch since starting our Yahoo group after one of our classmates died in the World Trade Center.

Since the 20^th reunion, we meet faithfully every five years. Each reunion has a reassuringly familiar pattern: mass at school, followed by a tour to see ‘what’s new’ and to good-naturedly complain about how lucky those girls are now.

Then we gather at the home of one of our classmates to catch up. Now and then, like at our 40^th, we also have a more formal brunch the following day.

At our mass, we continue a tradition that began a long time ago. During the offertory, one rose for every classmate who died is brought up to the altar, and they’re remembered by name.

So we begin our reunion by honoring those who aren’t there, but are still with us.

If you’re headed to a reunion this summer, or helping plan one, how will you remember your classmates who have died?

Coming Attractions on Friend Grief

I’m in New York this week, for Book Expo America and to meet some writing deadlines that have been hanging over my head. I thought this is a good time to let you know what’s coming up in the next few months here on Friend Grief:

1.      Guests. I’m quite excited that you’ll be seeing a guest blogger once a month. Men and women, their ages will vary, as will their perspectives. One was a caregiver to her friend, another is a grief professional. Yet another will offer a new take on the AIDS epidemic. All are excellent writers. What they share is the experience of grieving the death of a friend.

2.      Book reviews. More than one person has pronounced my subject matter ‘depressing’, and I’m sure it is to some people. I read some books about grief, but not a lot. While I am reluctant to create a hierarchy of grief, I do believe the grief we feel for a spouse or child is different than that we feel for a friend. But I’d like to share some of the books I have been reading, ones that deal specifically with the author’s grief over losing a friend. Some of them are celebrities, some are not. But all have something to say about the experience we will all have some day.

3.      Movie reviews, for the same reason as #2.

4.      Resources. Along with the book reviews, the Resources page will be expanded to include more organizations started by people who wanted to honor their friend’s memory. I’ll also be adding more social media: blogs, Twitter hashtags to follow, and Facebook groups.

5.      And last but not least, later this summer I will be publishing my first e-book on friend grief and anger. It’s a small book, about 5,000 words, and will be available later in print. As we get closer to the publication date, you’ll find out how you can download it for free.

So, get your popcorn and your drink, sit back and enjoy. There’s a lot more to come!

Friend Grief Lessons from "The Big Chill"

This was the basis of one of my first blog posts, but it still resonates today: what happens when we receive the sudden, shocking news of a friend's death.

Some of us are "at that age" when it seems we get this kind of news all-too-frequently. I've found out about the deaths of two friends - via Facebook status updates - in the past 6 weeks. It doesn't get easier. But you can lessen the guilt.

Karen: “You'll never get this many people to come to my funeral.”
Michael:  “Oh, Karen, I'll come. And, you know... I'll bring a date.”

You’re going about your day – conference calls, grocery shopping, carpool – when you get a call, a text, maybe an email with the subject line “sad news”.  Someone you know – a friend – has died.  And the world stops.

It happens to us all eventually.

The iconic film about this experience is The Big Chill, the 1983 film about a group of people who reunite for the funeral of one of their college friends.  It was a blockbuster, and not only because of the soundtrack (who can forget JoBeth Williams playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want?” on the organ for the funeral recessional?).  It was something everyone can identify with:  the death of a friend.

Not all of us will spend the weekend with our friends in a sprawling Southern mansion: playing touch football, getting high, or having sex with our best friend’s husband.  But reconnecting with friends on such a sad occasion can still have a profound effect.

Sometimes – too often – you lose touch with those friends.  Life gets in the way: jobs, families, living hundreds of miles away – all prevent you from keeping in touch with the people who at one time were the most important people in the world.  Still, you wonder how and why you let it happen.

Like the characters in The Big Chill, that gap in contact can create terrible guilt.  You may think that somehow your presence could’ve saved your friend’s life or made it easier.  Pretty egotistical, huh?  But human. 

These characters were all extraordinarily lucky:  they were all able to come to that funeral from their homes around the country.  Not everyone can even get off work to attend a local funeral for a friend, never mind one that is hundreds of miles away.

And most importantly, they were notified.  Sometimes friends – particularly far-flung friends – do not learn of a friend’s death for months or even years.  The friend’s family may not have liked you or even known about you, but to find out after the fact compounds your grief.  And even though the point where you can “do” something is long past by then, the feeling of helplessness can be overwhelming. 

One of my high school classmates, Carol Demitz, died on 9/11.  We’d celebrated our 30^th high school reunion the year before (although she didn’t attend) with the usual ‘we should get together more often’.   But it took Carol’s death – not the first in our class – to put those words into actions: a class gift in her memory, a Yahoo group that’s still going strong more than 9 years later, occasional informal dinners, and a bond that has grown stronger each year.  Her death, I suppose, was our Big Chill moment:  our wake-up call to nurture the friendships that sustain us, and stop relegating our dreams to the “someday” pile.

Take a moment today to contact a friend – just one; it won’t take long – who you’ve lost touch with.  Catch up on news and gossip, reminisce, and make real plans to get together.  Don’t wait until you get that call, that text, that email.

“In a cold world, you need your friends to keep you warm.” – Big Chill poster

What are you waiting for?

Trying to Avoid Friend Grief? Good Luck with That

A rose for each classmate who died

First of all, right off the bat, I’m going to say you can’t avoid friend grief. You can’t avoid grieving when a friend dies. But bear with me and read on.

We grieve our friends because we love them. We grieve for anything we’ve lost: hair, energy, good looks, high metabolism, our first car. Why wouldn’t we grieve for friends?

When someone is a part of your life – or was a part of your life – and they’re gone, there is a noticeable hole. Your life is now incomplete. That part of your life existed in part because of that friend. Your witness is gone.

What if I hadn’t had the courage to strike up conversations with total strangers a year ago January at the Writers Digest Conference? What if I’d just gone back to my hotel room instead of tagging along with seven other people for dinner? My writing – and the past year – would not have happened in the amazing way it did.

What if I hadn’t started talking to the other girl cooling her heels at the CYC dance sophomore year in high school? What if we hadn’t discovered that she and I were both waiting for the same girlfriend to show up (who didn’t)? We wouldn’t still be friends today.

What if I hadn’t taken the stage managing class I didn’t need when I first moved to Chicago, so I could try to meet people? What if I hadn’t agreed to stage manage the teacher’s next show? I wouldn’t have launched a career that included directing, founding a theatre and a trade association before morphing into a fundraising career.

At each of those moments, I did something that took, well, more guts that I normally possessed. Did I know those decisions were going to change my life? Of course not; I only know that in retrospect.

But what came of each moment was the beginning of a friendship – or two or three or twelve: friends who kept me going when life threw me curves. Friends who have encouraged me and loved me and tolerated me and been brutally honest with me: in other words, the definition of a true friend.

Not all of those friends are still here. Some I’ve simply lost touch with; too many have died. But perhaps more so than with family, our friends are a great barometer of the different times of our lives.

The program for my wedding welcomed our friends and identified the different groups: my husband’s California friends, my high school girlfriends, my theatre friends. We met them at different times in our lives. So it stands to reason that they knew us in different ways than those who met us at other times.

Think back to when you were in high school, or when you were married, or at your first job. You were a different person in each situation. Your friends knew you in that particular context. They didn’t know the “you” before that.

Now think of the special ones, the ones who continued to be your friend after you graduated, after you divorced, after you changed careers. Those friendships aren’t just based on a narrow definition of who you were: those friendships are built on mutual respect and love for who you’ve become.

Why wouldn’t you grieve for them?

Gatherings, whether they’re class reunions, weddings or even funerals, give us an opportunity to reconnect with people from our past. And almost everyone is nervous about that.

Why? Because we’ve changed, thank God, since we were 17.We’re the same, only different (And so are they, we often forget). Will they still like me, we wonder?

Some will, some won’t, but they’re still part of your past. They’re still part of the times in your life that make you who you are. And you’re still part of the times that make them who they are.

If you’re very, very lucky, you and your friends from those special times will still connect. Maybe you’ll only see each other at class reunions, have a great time, and that’s it. Nothing wrong with that.

But maybe you’ll both see those planned or chance reunions as an opportunity to re-establish your friendships.

The saddest part of a reunion is talking about who’s died. And the conversations inevitably revolve around how they lost touch with others. There may be regret, there may be full-fledged guilt. But there doesn’t have to be.

Take some time today to think back on a particular time in your life – not your whole life, just one period. Maybe it’s when you moved away from home, or when your kids were small, or you started that first really important job.

Think about the people who you considered friends. Maybe they were other moms, other new hires, other lonely kids far away from home for the first time. Remember why you became friends in the first place.

It’s so easy now to track down people. I’ve done it through my university alumni website, as well as Google and Twitter and Facebook.

So try to find one old friend, just one, and reach out to them. Maybe it’s the age I’m at, but I find when I’ve done that in the past few years, it’s always a very positive response. I can’t guarantee that’ll happen for you. But a brief, friendly “you popped into my head today and I just wanted to say hi” can make someone’s day. Including yours.

So, no, I’m sorry, you can’t avoid grieving when a friend dies. But you can make the effort now to never have to say “I should’ve called when I was thinking about it.”

“We’re at That Age” – Well, That Sucks

Anytime my husband and I discuss a friend’s health issues – or sudden death – I can count on him to say, “we’re at that age”. It’s meant to explain away whatever’s happening, as if it were the only possible reason.

Of course, to some extent that’s true. One of the downsides of growing older is that we lose a lot of people we love. We expect our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles to die; after all, they’re a generation older than we are.

But when people our own age – not to mention those younger – die, it’s a double loss. Because when our friends die, we lose a little of ourselves, too.

I’ve spent the past couple weeks dealing with loss and possible loss. One friend died suddenly. Another insists he’s fine, though his track record for revealing personal information is sketchy.

The one that’s been particularly tough for me is someone I’ve known and loved since I was in college. The story of our relationship is rather complicated, but most of that time we’ve been close, even while living far apart.

He had a health scare. Actually, he was extraordinarily lucky. About to be wheeled into the operating room for minor surgery, the anesthesiologist stopped everything. There was something wrong with David’s heart and it would be dangerous to proceed.

After a trip to the cardiologist, there was more sobering news. Not only did he need surgery, but he’d already had several silent heart attacks. We discussed the news mostly seriously – not completely, because there always have to be jokes between us.

Last week, he called me the night before surgery to tell me he was ready and (for him, anyway) calm. Then he told me that his partner had a short list of people to call if the surgery “went bad”. I was on the list.

Well, I thought I’d been handling all his news pretty well until he said that. I struggled to not fall apart. “Are you upset?” he asked, surprised. “Of course I’m upset,” I snapped. After a few well-chosen words I can’t repeat here, I conceded that I’d be much more upset if I wasn’t on the list. We wound up laughing, speculating about how I would express that particular displeasure.

But before we hung up I told him something I hadn’t told him for almost 35 years: I love you. Now he was the one choking up.

The day after the surgery I got a text from him: everything was fine, but he’d have to go back. Well, to me that meant everything wasn’t fine.

Last night he called. He’s back home, sounding stronger than our last few conversations. I got all the gory details; there will indeed be more surgery in 6 months. Now he faces radical lifestyle changes, which he is more than happy to follow, especially given how much better he felt almost immediately.

We talked about many things, and joked as much as possible. This time when we hung up, he was the one to say “I love you”.

It was a close call: for him and for me. Over the years we’ve argued and screamed, performed on stage together, shared a grad school advisor, laughed and cried. Mostly I think of going out dancing with him, doing our Fred and Ginger routines even at the height of disco.

This morning I told another friend this story. “It’s never too late to tell someone you love them,” she said.

But as we all know, sometimes it is too late. Sometimes we’re too self-conscious. Sometimes we assume they know, so we don’t need to say it. Mostly we just feel like there’s plenty of time.

There isn’t. There’s never enough time.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a day for spending money to prove romantic love.

How about if you also make it a day to prove you love your friends? You don’t have to buy candy or send flowers. Just send an email, make a call or text.

Tell them you’re moved by the spirit of that chubby little cherub, and you wanted to let them know how much they mean to you. Yes, I know it’s hokey, and possibly a little pathetic. But do it anyway.

The worst thing that could happen is that you embarrass yourself. It wouldn’t be the first time, right?

The best thing that could happen is that there will be no doubt in your friend’s mind how important they are to you. Bonus: you won’t feel guilty later on for not telling your friend you loved them.