Falling off the face of the earth

[I don't know who will hate this post more; men or women.  If you fall into either of those categories, feel free to take a pass and stop back tomorrow.]

For whatever the reason, male relationships seem to require less tending/nurturing than their female counterparts.  Having had personal experience with only the XY side of the gender divide, I can't really say with any certainly how female relationships work... what kind of investment in time/effort is required to maintain those relationships... or what it feels like for a woman to lose an old friend. 

I only know how these things work over here on my side of the fence.  Or I thought I did, anyway.

I can go years without speaking with old friends, yet when we run into each other or one of us remembers to call/email, it is as though the intervening time was no more than a few days.  Like a good book that falls behind the couch, so long as the page where I left off remains folded down, it takes only a moment to blow off the dust and pick up where we left off.

But I've noticed in recent years that occasionally I'll fold down a page on a friendship and push it aside, only to find out that someone I thought would be waiting there behind the couch has been picked up by The Housekeeper and thrown away. 

When this happens, it highlights an even more glaring difference between male and female relationships; specifically, how and why each grieves after losing a friend.

Again, I have only second-hand observations on which to base what I write here, but women seem to grieve very differently than men when they experience a loss.  More specifically, they seem to grieve for the the wreckage that the loss wreaks on their world.  I've heard the hushed conversations; "Oh, those poor children... what will her husband do?  How will they manage without her?"

Witnessing this kind of empathy makes me feel shallow and selfish by comparison.   On the occasions when I've heard about the death of old friends, the first thing that occurs to me - even before the sense of personal loss, and before the thoughts of the good times we shared - is my own mortality.

I know.  Selfish.  Shallow. 

Death is something that happens to old people... older than me, anyway.   I mean, for cryin' out loud, I'm not supposed to be getting email notices from my university alumni association telling me that holes in the ground are being filled with people I used to drink beer with!

Yesterday a coworker called me over during lunch and motioned for me to sit down.  When we were seated face to face he said, "You remember ___________ right?"  The name he mentioned was of a guy a year or two younger than me.  We'd both been 'eydim' (witnesses) at this coworker's wedding.  I wasn't close with the guy, but our world's are interconnected enough that we'd always behaved as buds whenever we ran into each other. 

I said, "Yeah sure, but I haven't seen or heard from him in years.  How's he doing?"

I didn't even need to wait for the reply.  Just the way my coworker winced when I used the present tense told me all I needed to know.  But Just the same I waited for confirmation.

"Yeah, I kinda lost touch with him too", began my coworker.  "I've been meaning to look him up but I never seemed to get around to it.  Well I sat down yesterday and started Googling him to see if I could track him down, and the first thing I came across was his name on a 'Refuah Sheleima'  (wishes for a full recovery) list on his synagogue's website from more than a year ago.  I did a little more digging but couldn't find anything else.  I knew he'd gone a couple of rounds with cancer about ten years ago, but the last I'd heard he was in remission and everything was fine.  I guess the cancer came back last year."

"So...?" I prompted him, "Did you find anything else out?"

"Yeah", he began.  "I looked up his phone number and called to see how he was doing.  His wife answered the phone. [a long pause]  When I asked to speak to _________ she told me that he'd died this past year."

I suddenly felt cold and clammy.  To buy time to deal with the icky stuff I was feeling... and to try to make my coworker feel a little better... I fell back on one of my most trusted defenses; I told an 'I can top that for sheer stupidity' story.

I began, "Well at least you didn't do what I once did.  I called up looking for an old friend I hadn't seen in years and chattily told his brother's wife, "Hi this is David Bogner, I'm a friend of __________. I've been trying to track him down for ages but he seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.  Can you give me his current phone number or email address?"   After a long pause she informed me that her brother-in-law was dead, having been killed when he, quite literally, fell off the face of the earth.  It turns out he'd gotten separated from his hunting buddies one night in the Adirondacks, and accidentally walked off a cliff."

My coworker digested my story and agreed that, yeah, at least he hadn't said anything quite that unfortunate to the guy's wife.  But he still felt terrible about calling a year late to accidentally offer his condolences to the the widow of a guy with whom he was supposedly good friends.

We sat there for a couple of minutes in silence.  I was still a bit floored by the way I was taking the news.  After all, I hadn't been all that close with the guy.  We'd run into each other at intervals of about three years... and I think I might have gone out with his sister once upon a time.  But I just couldn't shake the feeling that the emptiness in the pit of my stomach was as silly and inexplicable as Zahava's tears when the screenwriters for 'ER' killed off a pregnant wife in front of her husband and kids. 

What the hell?!

It was that last thought that helped me zero in on what was bothering me.  Walking back to my office I started thinking about what it was that made Zahava cry at certain television plot twists and not others.  The scenes that invariably got to her were the ones where a ragged hole was torn out of the fabric of someone's world.  She cried for the people who were left behind... the ones who had to try and repair the hole in their lives.  I invariably ended up staring only at the ragged hole.

As I said earlier, it may sound shallow and selfish, but when I hear about the passing of someone who could, in any way, be considered a contemporary, my first - and sometimes only - thought is of my own mortality.  And as if that weren't bad enough, my first feeling isn't about things like "Oh my G-d what would Zahava and the kids do without me".  There's no thought of "Goodness, how hard will it be for the kids growing up without me around?"   

No, for some reason I seem to fixate on selfish thoughts like "Think about how much I'd miss out on if it were me taking the dirt nap instead of him!"

I honestly don't know where I'm going with this, but I really got the wind knocked out of me yesterday.  I guess I needed to do some thinking out loud to figure out why the death of someone who could best be described as an 'acquaintance' had been able to shake me up so badly.

The best I can come up with at the moment is the observation that I wish I could be more like my wife (and her XX cohorts) and focus on those left standing at the top of the cliff.  It might also be nice to have a few less shallow, selfish thoughts about how much I dread the idea of being the one who, someday, will miss out by falling off the face of the earth.