The Power of Friendship

Originally published in The Laconia Daily Sun ›

The word friend is derived from the Old English freond meaning “one attached to another by feelings of personal regard and preference.”  We think of boy “friend” and girl “friend” as a relationship with an individual we prefer to be with at a particular time in our lives before making a commitment. In an obituary or reading memoir, someone will refer to their wife/husband or partner as their lover, companion and best friend.

We pause to reflect on the distinction.  Friendship.

We celebrate lovers on Valentine’s Day and family on birthdays, anniversaries and through gatherings of the “tribe”. Stimulated by an occasion.  We are genetically connected to our siblings and share the experience of finding our way through the first phase of growing up and yet naturally drift apart when we choose our own paths and are separated geographically. There isn’t a category or distinct opportunity to celebrate and mark our friendships.

Friendship has been on my mind often in the last few weeks because of the death of my late mother’s closest friend and, most recently, after spending the night with a dear friend in the ER at a major New York City hospital and learning she has a brain tumor. I trust and rely on the relationship I have with my own “best” friend who has been by my side for over fifty years. A bond I treasure.

We find references to friendship throughout literature and poetry. Artists talk of their muse, often an individual who isn’t in a more traditional category. What do we look for in a friend?

Someone who is sympathetic to our lens on the world. Who is willing to occasionally forgive us. A relationship that is without envy or jealousy. An individual who often experiences the transformations that occur as we move from one stage of life to another. Someone who has empathy, a sense of humor and the ability to solve a problem from a different perspective when we feel entangled in a web of despair, confusion or doubt.

My mother met Laura Place, the woman who would become her closest friend in the summer of 1966. Our family had moved to a new community and it was at church when my parents met Laura and her husband. At the time both women were involved with their families and their careers. As the children moved away and that foursome retired, they spent hours hiking, cross country skiing and playing cards. When my mother and Laura were together the merriment and joy surrounding their friendship was apparent to everyone. Then came the day they were both widows and the friendship reached another level of closeness.

It has been a difficult year, for all of us. The pandemic, natural disasters, politics and figuring out how we will adapt to a world transformed, layered one on top of another. Unrelenting, it seems.

We are comforted through the power of our friendships. Now those individuals are there for us at the end of the telephone or smiling through a zoom connection when we need them the most. Friendship, uncelebrated on any particular holiday, without a ceremony of confirmation.

You know it when you’ve got it.  The power of friendship.