Sometimes, the death of a friendship can feel like a haunting.
“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.
The first signs of our friendship’s death appeared when she did not win a poetry contest for which I served as a judge. you have humiliated me, she texted when the results were announced, each word on the glass screen as furious as a finger-jab. you have embarrassed me in front of my press. I was driving across the country with my husband when I felt my phone vibrate. We were on our way to a poetry conference, where I would give a talk on the craft of writing poems about trauma. how can you be so cold, she wrote. how could you do this. I wept as I read each new text out loud.
After that first near-death, the air between us felt colder. She began to drift away, becoming increasingly gauzy like a piece of silk sliding through my fingers. She stopped reading my poems and essays, stopped even asking about my work. This support was, she knew, what I treasured most about our friendship, all those evenings when we read one another’s writing and offered suggestions. Maybe you should break the line here; this metaphor could be more precise; I think you could expand this image of the trapped sparrow.
We would talk for hours on the phone. “I’m making my favorite beverage,”she might laugh, and I could hear in the background of her call the sputter of coffee brewing or a pitcher of milk being frothed, that shhhhh-shhhh-shhhh from the steam. Sometimes we spoke so long that I would have to say, “Hold on—I’m almost out of power.” I would plug the charger into the nearest outlet and sit on the floor with my back against the wall, placing the cellphone in my lap like a small, delicate animal that needed comfort.
But once our friendship began its dying, there were fewer and fewer conversations. When she did offer to read my work, her critiques were harsh and tearing. Or else, she was indifferent. “This looks fine,” she would say. The withdrawal was her punishment. Already, she was becoming spectral.
Almost two years after the dying first began, my friend finally chose to become a ghost. Over the stretch of a summer, she theatrically disappeared. Her silence was ostentatious and immense. My calls and messages went unanswered for weeks. I texted her, asked what had changed. Her answers answered nothing. I’m just so busy, she would say.
In a ghost story, tension is created through uncertainty. Is the ghost malevolent, in need of help, or simply lost? Those who encounter a phantasm must fill in the narrative on their own. During our last conversation, she complained about her most recent rejections from several literary journals. “I suppose you’re still getting as many acceptances as ever,” she said, her tone scraping like a querulous violin. I don’t know what I answered. But I remember thinking, when the call ended, that I would never hear her voice again.
By the time summer passed, I knew our friendship was a thing that should be laid to rest. I had waited too long already. In the Jewish tradition, we bury a body within 24 hours of death. When a loved one dies, we say the mourner’s Kaddish for eleven months minus a day. After that, the bereaved are expected to reenter their own lives. They must only reexamine grief on the anniversary of the death, the yahrzeit, lighting a candle that burns on the kitchen table for 24 hours, the flame like a flimsy, wobbling soul. It was time to reenter my life without her in it.
Then, in late fall, my friend decided to visit me from beyond. Ghosts are said to haunt the sites of their deaths or the places to which they once felt most attached, battlefields, creaking houses, cobwebbed alcoves. Because we had never lived in the same city or state, much of our friendship resided in the ether of texts and the internet. So, it seemed fitting that her arrival came in the form of an email on the evening of my 49th birthday.
I was sitting with my family in a restaurant. I felt the delicate buzz of my phone and looked down. Best wishes for a Happy Birthday, she wrote. My eyes slipped across her words, the accusations of arrogance, that I thought too much of my own accomplishments as a writer. People talk about how, in a moment of shock or desolation, food can become ash in the mouth. Something vicious occurs and the tongue responds with cremation. Everything it tastes turns to cinders. But—as I held the poisonous, green glow of the phone in my left hand, a fork still gripped in my right—the food tasted like choking smoke.
Later that evening, I wrote to her:
Your birthday message has given me the closure I so needed. I feel able to move on now. Thank you for that.
Good luck in your future endeavors.
Is it possible to escort a ghost from one’s life in such a crisp, businesslike way? My email had the detachment of a rejection letter; but, to me, it felt like a door held open as I spoke to an empty room. Go, I pleaded, please, leave now.
Still, I’ve allowed myself to mourn. There was a story I used to tell whenever people asked how my friend and I first met. “I was a young grad student,” I would explain. “And I wrote her a fan letter—an email saying how much her first book meant to me. Have you read it?” I would interrupt my story to ask. “It’s a wonderful collection. And that was how we became friends!”I would turn to look at her, waiting for a grin or nod in confirmation. But over the years, the story must have lost its shimmer. She stopped smiling back. Sometimes, she would say, “Oh, I can’t recall how we met,” and flit a hand, as if to clear away the thick lilies of a perfume from the air around her.
Sometimes friendships between writers are less spectral than they are ghoulish. Envy. Competitiveness. Insecurity. Every writer is a host to such creatures. And it is always difficult to confront that which horrifies the self. Looking back, I see what was hidden from me before—that my explanation must have struck her as cruel and self-congratulatory. When we became friends, I was very young, still discovering the voice of my poems and just beginning to publish, and I couldn’t believe that someone so gifted would want to make space for me in her life. My friend, two decades my senior, was further along in her career. By the time things ended between us, however, our positions had changed—and perhaps this haunted her, too.
And, yet—“Here, take half of this sandwich,” she would say, sliding the plate across the table toward me. “Do you want a taste of this cake?”she would ask while holding out her fork. Whenever we spent time together, she fed me, gave me a jacket to stay warm, even offered the lipstick from her purse. She was generous like that.
Still, I can admit too that exorcising her ghost was a relief. The morning after the birthday message, I woke to find the constant pain in my back was gone. For months, I had felt a sharp stone near the base of my spine, as if someone had lodged it there. It often hurt my sleep so that I twisted for hours in bed, unable to find a restful position. Some nights I barely dozed. But the email from my friend had dislodged, at last, the rock from its pointed place.
In a Jewish cemetery, we don’t lay flowers on the graves. A bouquet is too brief; blossoms wilt in a week. Instead, we put small stones on the headstones, leaving our grief behind us when we go. After we have cried, after we have kneeled beside the carved letters and let our fingertips follow each deep groove in the granite surface, we stand. We walk away. The pebbles stay where we have positioned them. The weight of our loss becomes lighter. The pain disappears from our spines. Those little, smooth stones pin our dead—at last—deep under the earth. Let them rest, I say. Let her rest and never return.
