T
here comes a time in every college-going young adult’s life when you go through the devastating experience of losing a best friend. These four years somehow both accelerate and encompass so many big milestones that it seems a tad ludicrous when you think about it, but it’s true. We start out by being on the cusp of adulthood and experience the epitome of our prime soon after. Our dreams, it seems to us, have never been more alive than at this moment and neither have our emotions been so true.
The most solid of friendships are found and formed in this era, perhaps ones that will last us a lifetime, such as the Hogwarts kids, Sam and Frodo, Huck and Tom; the list is truly endless. Pop culture cliches aside, we know it to be true. But just as many friends, if not more, are lost. Curiously enough, even though literature is riddled with the pain and heartbreak of lovers lost and love dying there seems to be no instruction manual lying around to guide you through something that might even be more traumatizing than any romantic breakup.
Take the drifting apart of Enid and Rebecca for example in Daniel Clowe’s “Ghost World.” The fact that they were high schoolers aside, their shared mockery and cynicism of the world portrayed an iconic friendship. But they drift apart because they finally discover their identities and their friendship ceases to make sense anymore.
Most of us assume and take for granted the fact that good friendships, the very best kind, are made to withstand anything and last for as long as you do. We’ve all made those plans to be senile and inappropriate together. These friendships then aren’t supposed to be the source of your turmoil, rather the respite you seek from everything else wrong and painful in your life. Breakups therefore are almost a little easier because of our flaky nature to constantly fall in and out of love. But broken friendships are tragic; someone who was once your biggest champion and saw you as a beautiful soul, now sees something repulsive in you.
It is shockingly brutal how easy it is to simply disconnect yourself from someone’s life. It’s an even more sobering realization that calling your best friend to wail about your day amidst the death of that same friendship is a right you don’t have anymore. The plug has been removed, the ties severed. So what do you do? Well if you are anything like me, and I’m assuming that you at least have a marginal fondness for books to be reading a literary column, you begin by finding solace in the literary world. And the great plethora of beautiful friendships that give us hope and something to aspire to.
I recently stumbled upon a true–and unlikely–friendship within the realms of the literary world. Apparently Mark Twain and Helen Keller were quite the best friends, despite a 45-year age difference; so much so that he always signed his letters to her with his real name Samuel L. Clemens preceded by, “Ever lovingly your friend.” One of her biggest supporters, he never shied away from gushing with superiority about their friendship, “An affectionate friendship which has subsisted between us for nine years without a break and without a single act of violence that I can call to mind. I suppose there is nothing like it in heaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and show off. I often think of it with longing, and how they’ll say, ‘there they come–sit down in front.’ I am practicing with a tin halo. You do the same.”
“How Should a Person Be?” by Sheila Heti is a true story about Sheila and Margaux and how the only friendships that are able to sustain themselves are those built on balance. There’s no better way to describe their bond than the following quote from the book, “If I had known, when I was a baby, that in America there was a baby who was throwing up her hands and saying, first words out of her mouth, Who cares? and that one day she’d be my best friend, I would have relaxed for the next twenty-three years, not a single care in the world.”
You are your friends’ biggest loyal supporter, even when they might seem crazier than a lunatic. This is what Hamlet and Horatio’s bond in one of Shakespeare’s best works taught me, “Hamlet.” There will be many friends who stick around for the ride when it’s all smooth sailing, but only the rare ones will still remain when things get bad. We all know things had gotten real bad for Hamlet, but not once does Horatio waver from his side.
Emily Brontë’s masterpiece, “Wuthering Heights” might be most notably known as a tragic love story, but what many forget is that Heathcliff and Cathy were first and foremost best friends since childhood. Their love was thus that much more intense and epic because of their bonds of friendship. Even as people deeply in love and emotionally disturbed, they were best friends always. And while their story may have ended in tragedy, neither their friendship nor their love was a farce and it was worth saving.
Time is the silent killer of everything; sneaking up slowly on every flourishing thing and chipping away at them. And friendship is just another one of its victims. Or is it? I truly believe that time, flighty and unreliable as it may be, also thoroughly preserves and allows to thrive friendships that are special and irrevocably real. So amidst the throes of woeful thoughts and wondering wherever did your partner in crime disappear off to, perhaps holding on to the fact that you had the wrong person driving the getaway car and the wrong person helping you drag the body across the living room floor would be comforting.
Has a book helped you get through the loss of a friend? What friendships in books have you found especially insightful? Email Maham at mhasan4@wisc.edu
