How to Heal When a Close Friendship Fades

A few months before the pandemic, my aunt, who’d always been a second mother to me, had been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. We spent Christmas of 2019 in the hospital with her as she endured surgery. When the surgery hadn’t gotten it all, she began chemo treatments in January. Undergoing chemo is never easy, but doing so as a pandemic breaks out adds an extra layer of fear and uncertainty. My aunt was only two months into her treatments when Covid broke out, and our family spent many nights worrying, praying, and crying, afraid that she, the most vulnerable among us, would become infected.

My friend was there, calling and texting, asking about my aunt as if she were her own. She knew what it was like, the helplessness of watching a loved one suffer. Her mother, paralyzed by a stroke, had passed away three years prior, and we exchanged battle stories of illness, grace, and death. Those soul-baring conversations propped me up in those days. While they didn’t eliminate the pangs of anxiety over my aunt’s fate, they replenished me, allowing me to go back and face my family with an optimistic outlook.

I’d never had anyone close to me be diagnosed with cancer, so it helped to have a loving party standing just outside the bubble of our family anguish. When the waves of bleakness threatened to engulf me, my friend was there to pull me up, away from the weary hearts of the family, and into a world where the twin pillars of vulnerability and wit guided our interactions.

Patients traditionally ring a bell at the end of their last chemo session, signifying the conclusion of the journey. My aunt’s mantra had become “I just can’t wait to ring my bell. I’m ready to ring my bell.” As her final treatment approached, my (quarantined) family traveled to the mountains to celebrate with her. The day of, my aunt was told that the bell-ringing tradition had been temporarily suspended due to Covid-related regulations. Her bitter disappointment over not being able to ring her bell turned to joy when she stepped out of the clinic following her final session. The whole family was congregated in the parking lot with a bell for her to ring, balloons, party favors, and abundant love. My friend called to join in on the celebration via video chat, and the happiness in her voice told me that we weren’t just friends, we were family.

She was in the final year of her MBA program, and the sudden pandemic-related changes threw her for a loop. I encouraged her every step of the way, cheering her on through every paper, every assignment, and every good grade. Once, she got some ambiguous feedback on a paper she’d submitted. She was very upset; when she huffily relayed the professor’s notes to me later that day, we spent the rest of the evening thinking up creative insults about him, laughing at who came up with the best ones.

And that’s how it was. Extended unemployment for me. A back injury for her. Finding a way to bring the hot yoga experience home for me. Keeping up with jogging without the gym’s treadmill for her. We cried with each other when George Floyd was murdered, prayed for each other before nights spent at Black Lives Matter rallies, and lifted each other up when the racial pandemic-within-a-pandemic threatened to become too much to bear. In a world where information morphed by the minute, our talks were a safe place to come back to, a place where all the sacred truths of friendship remained unchanged.

Although we were both confined at home, the summer was full. I shared stories about the cicadas in my yard, the bears emerging from hibernation in my hometown, and the cats that took up residence under my shed. I made her go outside to look at each full moon, and she made me learn to make pizza from scratch (she does it all the time!). She shared stories about her neighbors, her arts and crafts and her love of poetry. And as coronavirus raged outside our respective doors, our chats were full of the unbridled trust of authentic friendship.

When the New Year came around, my family and I celebrated having survived 2020. I didn’t realize that distance had walked in and quietly taken a seat between us, my friend and I.

As a young girl, I’d had a favorite t-shirt that I wore as much as I could get away with. One day, I went to put it on, and there was a hole right in the front. I’d spent so many days folded in its comfort that I hadn’t noticed it had a weakness in it. By the time I knew, the hole was there and was already beyond repair.

In January, the calls stopped altogether, and the texts grew further apart. My text messages would go unanswered for days, then hastily responded to with no additional context. She said she was busy.

There I was, recording plant videos that would never be sent, saving links that would never be shared, still operating within the framework of a friendship that the Rona had built, not knowing that it didn’t, couldn’t, exist in the real world (or whatever semblance of it that we were in at the time). It only existed in Coronavirusland, where all of humanity was at home, afraid and clinging to the people and things they would reach for only in a time like this.

I suppose there is something to be said about being one of the people someone reaches for when the world is ending. But as the world restarted, and people stopped dividing what was “essential” from what was not, we all dropped everything back into the same bucket again to save for people to sort out in the next century’s pandemic.

After months of unemployment, I got a new job. Tears welled in my eyes, and gratitude in my heart, as I read the offer email again and again. She was one of the first people I wanted to tell. By then, though, the distance had already grown far beyond the days when reaching out felt so easy and intuitive. I started harp lessons, tried new recipes, and launched a new business. After two months of regularly reaching out with little to no response, I told her I wouldn’t be texting her anymore, that the ball was in her court. She’d have to reach out if she wanted to talk to me. That was in early March, exactly one year to the day since we had reentered each other’s lives, a year since the first shutdowns began. She hasn’t reached out since. She still doesn’t know about my (now not-so) new job.

The frogs made their spring reappearance (and fall disappearance) on my porch, and I had no one to tell. At the time, she was the only one in my life who cared about things like that. Every time something came up that I would have told her about, I felt the pang of abandonment and wistfulness all over again.

I never got true answers as to why she abruptly stopped communicating. If I had it to do again, I’d have called one last time to share how her actions had hurt me, find out how she was feeling, and gain some understanding. But rejection’s dagger cut deeper than any logic could reach, and I stubbornly stood by my vow not to reach out again. At one point in May, I typed up a hello text, including a picture of a bear I’d recently seen when visiting my hometown. When it came time to hit send, I hesitated. Finally, I hit select all, delete. For months, I wondered whether sending that text would’ve changed things.

Healing came slowly, but deliberately. As a creative, my writing and music have always been places of healing for me, and I dove into new opportunities in the months following our last communication. I also took intentional steps to connect more deeply with my local community, including joining a book club, connecting with the strong network of Black farmers and culinary creatives in my area, and restarting my yoga journey. This led to new connections and strengthened ties with those I already knew. I cultivated and nurtured new sources of kinship and intimacy, and realized that without the bond I’d shared with my friend, I might not have become the kind of person who could let new people in. And with that came the realization that I will forever treasure our friendship for what it was at its best: Light in the midst of the Rona.