The older you get, the more people you lose.
The more people you miss.
The first person I lost wasn’t because of death. I lost my father when I was 2 years old because he left my mother. I never saw him again and I never learned very much about him.
I can’t really say I lost my paternal grandparents — my grandmother, my grandfather and my step-grandmother all died before I was born. Two of them are buried about an hour from where I now live.
But this isn’t another lament about family. I’ve said enough about that unless I unexpectedly learn something more.
It certainly hurts to lose family members, but it hurts almost as much to lose friends.
Sometimes they die, sometimes they just stop being your friends.
Until five years ago, I had five different friendships that spanned 45-50 years. They weren’t all continuous. One was someone I stopped seeing in 1973 and reconnected with on Facebook 35 years later. Four of those five are people I am still in contact with.
The fifth, my good friend Tom Kensler, died in the summer of 2016 of a brain aneurysm, just short of his 65th birthday.
He was hardly the first friend I lost. I had a wonderful friend in high school with whom I formed the Chess Club as a sophomore, and we spent lunch hours for three years either playing chess or playing bridge. John and I lost touch when we went to different colleges, and when I e-mailed him 25-30 years later to trip and re-establish contact, I never got an answer.
My friend Chris was one of my groomsmen at my first wedding and we were good friends into the ’80s. We lost touch, though, and haven’t spoken in more than 35 years.
The last important friend my own age that I lost was the one. that hurt the most. Mike and I became friends through fantasy baseball, beginning when I was 43 years old. He and I basically ran the league, and he was the glue that held it together. Our friendship gave the lie to the old saw that you don’t really make lasting friends in middle age.
We did well for 15 years, but in 2008 the league developed serious problems, and Mike and I disagreed on what should be done. The league died after 25 seasons, and Mike blamed me at least in part. He cut me out of his life, and our friendship died. It was probably the saddest failed relationship in my life that didn’t involve a woman.
I had a bizarre dream last night. It involved our former league getting together to do a draft. I saw Mike on one side of the room and crossed to speak to him.
“I miss you,” I said. “Can we be friends again?”
He looked at me for a few seconds and then said in a dull voice. “I’ll have to think about it.”
There’s nothing worse than losing people who matter to you.