After last week’s post, I thought I’d keep things light by writing about ‘pockets of beauty,’ small things that bring joy and hope into my life. But that was before I lost my friend Eleni to cancer. Eleni’s passing has made me reflect on the fragility of life, as well as the importance of meaningful friendships.
They say the quality of your life is determined by the people who surround you, and that the best way to know someone is to look at the friends they keep. As someone who travelled and moved countries through most of her twenties, I can support this claim. The friends I made became my family, and often, my lifeline in challenging times.
It would have been tough to get through the time I served in the IDF without Ravit by my side, and during the eleven years I lived in London I made friends for life. The Russell and Melita families, whom I was fortunate enough to live with, became my role models for parenting, and in many ways, my adoptive families. Carlos and Danira, whom I met in acting class, I still see regularly when I am back in Budapest. It had been years before I had the chance to see Brett again in Australia, and yet, we seemed to have picked things up where we left off, although we both had our own families now and were going through some major personal challenges. It was the same feeling I had with Sarah, when I caught up with her at the Tate Modern this year. Some friendships stand the test of time, no matter how many years pass.
And some friendships change, and deepen. A misunderstanding that made us lose touch with each other for almost a decade, resolved itself organically when Alice called me one afternoon and we talked for hours. And some misunderstandings never get resolved, and you suddenly lose a close friend without knowing what had actually happened.
Some friendships fade when you realize that you have outgrown each other, or just happen to be on a different path. This can be uncomfortable, and painful, when you love a friend, but can no longer ignore the unsettling feeling in your stomach that being in their company depletes your energy.
Rarely, and magically, some friends can affirm you in the fullness of your particular being. Whenever I meet with Catherine at the Polish deli for our “shabbat sausage” (eating pork sausages on Friday, under the picture of Pope John Paul II), we manage to cover an extensive ground of topics that stretch from the personal, political, cultural and linguistic, all the way to the philosophical. My head is spinning after those two hours, but I feel seen and appreciated in my full complexity.
Perhaps this is why I gravitated towards Ines ten years ago at the pool, when she made the honest admission that she found balancing her writing with motherhood a challenging act. In our brief, but forever inspiring coffee session, I learn from Ines about psychoanalysis and discuss the close link between psychology and literature.
I first met Liam (aka my “soul brother”) at Italian 200 while at university, but our connection deepened when we met again at Italian Renaissance. We bonded over Italian prepositions, pizza and cannoli, and kept each other sane through most of the Covid lockdown. Aïcha and I share a favourite writer (Toni Morrison), a favourite novel (Sula) and the same favourite line (“my lonely is mine”). No wonder that we can send each other messages telepathically. These kinds of connections are rare and one cannot expect a friend to answer our myriad needs; sharing one common value, or interest, is already a gift.
At our core, we are social being with a crucial need to be loved, and have our basic worth recognized. Our need for belonging and comfort is paramount to our health, well-being and us thriving in this topsy-turvy world.
I recognize this because I remember how lonely I felt during the six years I spent in a kibbutz as a ‘yaldat hutz’ (“outsider girl” in Hebrew) during my most formative years, age 12-18. My best friend at the time who I shared a room with, used to sneak boys into our bedroom and kindly asked me to listen to my Walkman at night. During classes, she was busy writing me beautifully decorated love letters, in which she listed my many physical short comings, but reassured me that she loved me anyway. My luck was that I was already a sucker for literature, so I escaped into the riveting world of Greek Drama during my free afternoons. An interest that wasn’t shared by any of my classmates, and a weird curiosity I was often mocked for.
And then, there are the friendships that are cut short, that remind you that you are lucky to be alive at all. Eleni was a force of nature, a ‘warrior woman’ as I renamed her, recognizing her determination to never give up on a challenging yoga pose, as well as her determination to never give up on life. And although Eleni and I shared only one coffee, but many, many meaningful conversations on random street corners, I shall miss her terribly. Whenever I think of her, I will remember that no one’s life should be taken for granted, and as cliché and cheesy as this might sound – we should always strive to be kind to each other.
And then there are the childhood friendships, the telephone friendships, the intense friendships that last a summer season...the firendship palette is so vast. Some pass, some stay, some die and we thank them all.
😘 Now I have “Always look on the bright side of life” stuck in my head!!