The Seam That Joins Us

We have just received our new “Friends” membership packet to the Emily Dickinson Museum, a place my husband and I like to support for many reasons.  Since I have been thinking a great deal about friendship recently, the mailing is particularly timely for me.  A refrigerator magnet that was included in the envelope has a famous sentence from one of the poet’s letters:  “My friends are my ‘Estate.’”  It is such an apt way to describe both how the museum values its donors as well as how many of us treasure our close relationships.  Although Emily Dickinson may have been a recluse in her later years, she was someone who invested a great deal of energy in friendships.  Indeed, her intense feelings, her excitement about sharing experiences with people as well as her frustrations about breaches in relationships and grief at the loss of friends came out in many poems and letters.

My mind has been dwelling on this topic more than usual because over the course of the past several months two of my good friends, women about my age, have died.  As Emily Dickinson once described it, there is a feeling of “split lives” when we go through this kind of time:  people who were just right there near us are inexplicably gone, and it is so strange, so painful.  I feel pangs of these friends throughout my days now, reminders everywhere, and am trying to get a hold of what it was I had with each of them.  Talking to my husband, who has had years of experience helping families deal with loss, has been helpful and has also – in some moments –  raised more questions for me.  How do we find any peace in letting someone go? Can religious faith enable us to walk over the abyss?  Is God there for us in the gaps?

The 16^th century writer, Montaigne, wrote a collection of more than one hundred essays over the course of about twenty years.  What is extraordinary about these, in a way, is their quality of ordinariness.  His topics were not elevated; he meandered through aspects of his own regular daily life and thoughts.  In so doing, he offered his readers a kind of mirror in which they can recognize themselves.   One of the best known is “Of Friendship,” in which he celebrates the bond he had with a scholar named Etienne de La Boetie.  Here’s how he describes their closeness:

In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.  If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.
(The Complete Essays of Montaigne  Book 1:28)

This sounds like friendship turned up to the highest setting.  Here we are again at that line between the ceiling and the wall – the place where each is identified as distinct and yet, at least in his description, where the border between one and the other disappears.  Most of us, I believe, can reap so many benefits from a friendship even without losing sight of the seam that sewed us together in the first place.   And, even though Montaigne makes a case for nourishing one perfect friendship over a number of  “mild and regular” ones, my experience shows that there is much to be gained by maintaining rich relationships from various chapters of our lives.

As I grieve the loss of two women, I also have a renewed appreciation of what my other friendships continue to provide.  Not long ago, I was fit to burst with details of an unusual family event; but then regular daily life resumed (as it does), and I realized how much I craved an in-person meeting with two good friends.  Once I’d related my experience to them, an experience that might have gotten too stale to talk about pretty soon, I was ready to go on to other things – oh, and to hear their stories too, of course.  They understood this completely.   Since then, I have also had one out-to-dinner with another good friend and two small gatherings at my house, with different friends.  Each time, I was struck by how invigorating and replenishing it was for us to bounce so much off one another.  We talked about what our teenage children are doing and what they are needing from us now, about caring for aging parents and injured husbands, about serving on non-profit boards, about what we remember doing in college, about what we hope to do in the months to come.  We took stock of things, in a way – paused long enough to see where each of us was so that we wouldn’t lose track of one another as we continue to move forward.

Back when my youngest child was a toddler and we used to drive past the Emily Dickinson Homestead, he would look in the driveway there and sometimes see a car.  “She’s home!” he would proclaim.  And maybe she was, maybe she was.  But one thing is for certain:  as the years and the decades and the centuries go by, she will continue to gain readers through the words that invite others in.  As for me, I will keep my absent friends as close as I can, because they will always be part of my estate.