A friendship of nearly 30 years ended in 2021. We had been friends since 7th grade. We called each other sister. She has four younger brothers and I’m an only child. We chose each other as a sister. We stood next to each other at our weddings, cried together when people we loved died, celebrated each other’s successes, and supported each other through a total of 3 divorces, two step-fathers, 4 college and graduate degrees, and across hundreds of miles. I watched her become a mother of 3. I held her babies when I visited so she could fold clothes or clean the kitchen. We would catch up between feedings and over dirty dishes.
We rocked out to Savage Garden at the 1997 Missouri State Fair. We sat in the very last seat of the school bus in 1995, blasting Ace of Base on cassette from a dinky boom box. I was with her the day one summer in the late 90s when she probably broke her nose when riding a wave-runner. She was with me when I lost my brand-new prescription sunglasses in the Osage River in 1994. She consoled me as I sobbed on the walk home. She also shared in my joy when I found them 2-weeks later on the banks after the river levels dropped. We were silly, awkward teenagers together.
We have a lot of shared history.
I have struggled with acknowledging this friendship is over. I deeply mourn the loss of what we shared and reel at the seemingly overnight changes.
But they didn’t happen overnight.
I felt a shift start around 2016 when she told me she supported the candidate who would become our 45th president. I couldn’t understand how this loving, compassionate, beautiful inside and out woman who I had seen go to extraordinary lengths to help others she barely knew could support a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women and said horrible things about anyone who challenged him. He was the antithesis of who she was.
She and her then-husband joined an evangelical Presbyterian church near their home around this time (or maybe a little before). I suspected she was beginning to adopt their very conservative worldview. As time passed and she moved deeper into that church life, our differences grew.
Our friendship through the years…
She and I met in 1993 when she moved to Bonnots. We became friends shortly after when she transferred to my school. She was the only non-Catholic student at St. Mary’s Elementary. Within a year, she converted to Catholicism. She later admitted she did this to fit in. What 13-year-old doesn’t? We both eventually walked away from Catholicism.
In college and as young professionals, we talked frankly about religion. We both believed in a higher power; we didn’t like the controlling aspect of religion. We couldn’t understand how anyone could blindly follow a religious tradition.
She was a rock for me and support to my family as my Uncle Willie died at the end of 2019. She worked at the same hospital he was admitted. She looked at his chart, provided another professional perspective on what was happening, and was the compassionate and honest soul we needed at a difficult time. When she came to the funeral, I burst into tears. I was so grateful she was there. Her daughter, about 1 at the time, provided an incredibly wonderful interruption to the day’s grief. A tiny, gleaming life who had no idea of the loss that was just suffered.
A considerable shift in our friendship happened in 2020. We had very different views on the pandemic. She believed COVID-19 was lab-made and deliberately released. She ascribed to a worldview and theories that seemed wholly out of touch with my perception of truth. Our differences grew greater faster than we could address. Eventually, the bridge between us collapsed.
A year after my uncle’s death, our friendship was on life support.
It has taken me time, but I realize that I am mourning the loss of what we once had. I am tied to this friendship because of the history we have. If I met her today without any of that history, I wouldn’t be her friend. She and I are just too different. Our values and worldview don’t align. The gap between them is too large to bridge.
We just aren’t friends anymore.
That’s the most challenging part of this process – we are doppelgangers of the teenagers, college students, young wives/professionals, and women we once were. We were friends in our teens, 20s, and 30s, but not at 40. My mind can’t comprehend this reality.
I know we aren’t the only ones who had a friendship-down experience in the last seven years. I have heard many many stories of decades-long friendships ending because the differences between people grew too great. That knowledge isn’t comforting when it’s your friendship that sank. It is both our fault and neither of our fault the friendship ended. It’s just what happens in life: things end.
I still think about her often and I always wish her well. I miss our friendship and am so grateful we had it. We aren’t friends anymore, but I still love her.
That part of our relationship will never end.