Just a few days after we found out my grandma’s cancer is back and aggressive, one of my dogs went into heart failure and ended up in intensive care.
They both are fine for the moment, but they won’t be sometime soon.
We’ve always got a ticking clock on us, but sometimes that clock gets louder. And it’s at those times when you feel the extent of how much you have invested and how little control you have over, well…anything.
Making friends, putting a little bit of yourself in their keeping, is an ultimate act of trust and investment in possible future pain. I think some people see this transaction cost upfront and tend to opt out of life and relationships because the fine print no-pain-until guarantee isn’t ironclad enough to be worth their investment.
You can look at the pain at the end as a sign of failure, whether it’s an actual “end” or just the end of a friendship. Or, you can look at it as a sign that you were all in, and they were all in, if only for a certain amount of time – and maybe it was all the time they had.
I am trying to see this last week as proof a good investment.
The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it 