22 June 2025

"Friendship" - a guest post by Timothy G. McKenna

Please welcome our own commenting community’s

Timothy G McKenna

as the author of this week’s guest post! This is his first guest post, but I hope for more. Perhaps he’ll finish up some of those ‘rest of the story’ essays—anticipated by many of us—that he mentions having started.

This topic is just the thing I would have chosen myself this week. My best friend, who is visiting me right now for the first time since Covid overturned everyone’s plans, is my lifeline. She was twelve and I was thirteen when we met at a girl scout activity. I needed a friend (the former best friend of my earlier childhood had dumped me the year before) and so did she. That magical spark of soul-kinship happened. We’ve stood by each other through thick and thin ever since.

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Friendship

by Timothy G. McKenna

Photo by Amir Hosseini on Unsplash

Is there anything more terrifying than an empty piece of paper when you’ve promised a friend that you’d write a piece on friendship for a bunch of your other friends?

Right now, the answer is “no.”

Quite a long time ago I told Celia that I’d be happy to write about my family experiences, or about life as an architect, or about traveling to a war zone with my college roommate almost 40 years ago. Actually, I did try: they’re all here on my desktop, wondering what they did wrong and why I don’t actually finish them like I’ve started to, oh, about 47 times each…

Anyway…there’s nothing like a deadline and a few failed attempts to focus the mind on writing down a few observations about friendship that have spent a lot of time bouncing around in my head lately.

I believe that, being social creatures, we are naturally born with the friendship instinct—probably something that was necessary for survival as a relatively weak but highly intelligent species in our early days. Like so many other creatures without particularly great strength or speed or natural protection against the elements, we had a good chance of dying out thousands and thousands of years ago.

Our ancestors figured out ways to survive, though, by learning how to work together, to organize ourselves into functioning groups to hunt food and protect our young, and to trust each other that we could actually go to sleep at night with a reasonable expectation that the guy lying on the cave floor next to us wasn’t going to bash in our skull and take our wooly mammoth chop.

Somewhere along the line, this trust developed into something enjoyable and comforting—something to be nurtured. It made working together a little easier. It also made it possible to develop a larger group of individuals that would feature a wider collection of talents, skills, and insights, which led to sustainable communities with the ability to grow and thrive. Communities with an expectation of safety and—something entirely unique—aspirations for living with dignity and respect.

Friendship, though, goes beyond this. The joy of sharing experiences, common feelings, and laughs—lots of them—is mixed with this social trust and sometimes a spark, an effervescence that occasionally elevates daily life to something wonderful.

I know that my life is an almost precise balance of joy and pain, of success and failure, of great happiness and almost unbearable suffering. Through each and every one of these moments, though, I have had friends to share them with, and I have been blessed to be able to respond in kind, to help my friends celebrate or grieve.

About 40 years ago, my college roommate, Ned, lost his wife at a very young age to a very rare, painful, and incurable disease called scleroderma. Related to lupus, it degrades the connective tissue in a body, robbing it of flexibility, eventually turning its victims almost into stone before attacking the vital organs and shutting them down, one by one. Marcelle took her death sentence with equanimity and really was, by all accounts, a happy warrior. She hosted parties for friends in her home, found time in her busy day to keep up with her pals and a lot of Ned’s friends, and she loved to laugh at my jokes.

One sorrowful Valentine’s Day, she was having lunch in Manhattan (Ned couldn’t join her; he was on deadline at Time magazine) when she suddenly stood up, said she couldn’t breathe, and collapsed. She was only 27 (we all were), but mortality came calling. Ned’s pain was all-encompassing, and for a long time we would spend entire nights on the phone with each other, sometimes not saying a word but clinging to the connection the phone afforded us.

Years passed. Ned got on with his life, had a wonderful career and a stellar family, and I flailed for a bit. Marriage, divorce, losing a couple of jobs—an all-too-common story. Almost 25 years ago, though, I met a beautiful, wonderful woman, and we have had a great marriage. Two years into it, we had a baby girl, Molly, and life was great.

Five years later, though, all was shattered with Molly’s terminal diagnosis of a brain tumor. Through all of that terrible year before she passed, Ned was on the phone from the other side of the country, always there. A couple of years later, my wife and I had another daughter, and we live a wonderful, happy life, with just enough of the other side of life at times to temper the joy.

True friendship is uncanny. My friend, Ned? He just called me, about 5 minutes ago. Not for any particular reason—talking about this summer and the Red Sox—just wondering how I’m doing. I’m grinning ear-to-ear at the magic.

Not to say friendship is always so poetic and touching. It can be kind of like the waxing scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin…but also like the road trip in Field of Dreams. Three of my best friends growing up—John, Brendan, and Jord—have passed away. Ned is still on the other side of the continent. Even my brothers, as close as we are, have spread across the country and we rarely see each other. But I’m as close as ever to all of these guys, because the moments, memories, and insights they’ve shared with me have stuck.

Sharing, celebrating, comforting—I don’t think that mankind has been able to create anything as wonderful or necessary as true friendship. Something that comes so naturally and easily most of the time, yet really demands careful attention and effort always. Like the greeting card in the store says, “Good friends will bail you out of the jail after a crazy night, but your best friend will be sitting next to you in the cell, saying, ‘That was hilarious!’”

But the wisest sage on this subject is my 4-year-old nephew, Jake: “To has a frien’, you has to be’s a frien’!” Jake—unsurprisingly—has TONS of friends and is living a wonderful, happy life.

Happy Sunday, my friends!