OMG Digital Magazine OMG Issue 279 5th October 2017 COMPLETE | Page 11

OMG Digital Magazine | 279 | Thursday 5, October, 2017 • PAGE 11
Relationship
The Comfort Connection
How to Help a Friend in Need
By Catherine Calvert
who'd cried in movies and laughed over
lunches for years together, were moving
apart. She'd embarked on a long, slow,
and certain end to her life. I was square in
the middle of mine.
She called me today. She was tired, she
said, of being alone. I knew what it took
her to call and ask a favor, and of course
my answer was yes, come quickly. There
was soup for lunch, and then she needed
a nap, and I settled her into the guest
room and tucked her in as I once did my
children, pulling the blanket up to her
ears and tiptoeing down the hall. The
silence that settled was nearly palpable
as she lay tangled in dreams and I sat
trying to sort this new bend in the road
of our friendship. We who had shared
everything from first job to first child,
we who could sit on the front steps and
settle the world's problems in an evening,
we who agreed on nearly everything
important but what made up a pizza
topping and whether Jane Austen was a
necessary adjunct to the well-lived life, we
There must be something we can do,
I'd thought, when she first told me. I've
always been the kind of person with
bookshelves of directories, an Internet-
site list that doesn't quit, and little pieces
of paper that shower from my diary with
scribbled phone numbers of therapists,
doctors. Have you tried this? What about
that? I asked her, and stuffed envelopes
with clippings and dropped books on her
doorstep. And she nodded and smiled,
and I'd find them unread in the hall when
I arrived with a casserole and a bottle of
wine. She'd laugh at my offerings—bath
salts, when she was a shower person, the
book of encouraging verse, when we'd
once howled at sentiment. I wanted to fix
it. When I couldn't, I fixed cookies.
As the weeks went on, I was all bustle and
she was silent. We were reticent where
once we were fluent. She knew things I
didn't know, I was afraid of intruding; the
easy assumptions of friends' shared space
had vanished. Never before had I felt the
force of the expression "in rude health"—
my own sturdy self seemed to me like an
affront to her. Would I say the wrong thing?
Better to say nothing at all, I thought and
subsided, reduced to answering-machine
messages and cheery cards in the mail,
and so the silence grew. A week went by,
then another, till the phone call came.
Where are you? I miss you, she said, and
I admired the grace in the act, the hand
across the widening gap. I climbed on the
bus, holding the flower that had seemed
irresistible at the corner, just one, a rose
that spoke of summer. I was up against
it—what did I have to offer if I couldn't
offer a cure? I waited at her door, twirling
my flower, tongue-tied again. But she was
there, and she was smiling. Come keep
me company, she said. I've missed you.
And so, in fits and starts, we began to make
a different friendship, this one based on
bedrock. For when you can't mend what
is broken at the center of a friend's life—
whether it's the marriage that's gone
forever or the lost child or the vanished
job—you learn a deeper truth, how to
accept the unacceptable and, however
slowly, move along together. In the
end, all I have to offer is, perhaps,
a little comfort as the waters
rise.