A Case for Friendship

I am not a lover of commercial holidays. Yet, because I live in this country, I am subject to the undertow of advertising and groupthink. So when Mother’s Day comes around, always about a week after my birthday (which, for me, is a personal, noncommercial holiday), I am reminded of how much of a lemming I have become. When I tell my children that I don’t like Mother’s Day, I know it falls on deaf ears. They, my lemming cubs, feel obliged to buy cards and gifts. They get swept up by the current running beneath North America: if you have a mother, you must honor her with something — be it a card, candy, flowers, anything — to give attention to the person out of whom you came and from whom you emancipated.

In our myopic and insensitive society, we do not consider all the people whose mothers are dead, mentally ill or just plain mean and all the young women who would like to be mothers but have suffered losses, infertility and abusive relationships. There is just one general Mother’s Day when the Everymother is May’s hood ornament.

This repeats in June for Father’s Day — although the degree of intense commercial assault is a bit less for dads. What if you dislike your father, what if he was absent, what if he liked your brother more? There is no regard for the honest and authentic relationships the general population has with fathers (or mothers). Again, the Kool-Aid is distributed to everyone; off we all go to buy greeting cards depicting men fishing, golfing or barbecuing.

An aside: I once thought about creating greeting cards that might correspond to the real situations of peoples’ lives. As a therapist, I thought I could sell them in my waiting room.

Happy Mother’s Day! — I am learning you did the best you knew how

 Happy Father’s Day! — Did you expect we would have a good relationship when you were at the office my entire childhood?

 Happy Anniversary! — It’s been 15 years of me deferring to you! That’s about to change …

 Happy Birthday, Sister! — I was not that happy when you were born

It is actually not my intention to write about holidays, but rather about what we fail to honor, what we never shine enough light on. Most people have traditions regarding the celebration of birthdays (parties, gifts, special food), wedding anniversaries (cards, flowers, candlelit dinners), Thanksgiving (turkey and pumpkin pie), religious holidays, and even days to remember the dead. Congress has established national days to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. We don’t work on the first day of every year or on the day in early July when we celebrate the Second Continental Congress’s adoption of the Declaration of Independence; we take pause in September to acknowledge the labor movement, and then again in November to commemorate our veterans — and one recently established in mid-June, to memorialize the end of the slavery of African Americans.

But what about that relationship, without which we would languish, without which we would suffer deep loneliness and isolation? Why is it we don’t organize or formalize at any level — personal, local, federal — the honoring, celebrating, recognizing, thanking, or paying tribute to the people in our lives who are our true friends? Not our acquaintances or even our neighbors. Not our partners. But our closest friends, the ones we confide in, for whom we would do anything, those who track our lives, who know when we are upset with ourselves or with our mothers, fathers, spouses and children, the ones with whom we share deep love and loyalty. There is no ritual or ceremony, no day set aside to honor these important relationships. After all, they are not financial or legal arrangements; there are neither tax nor employment benefits to friendship; there are no state or federal laws governing anything between friends. Friendship is the only essential relationship governed and organized only by the heart.

In Ireland, there is a more literal and symbolic emphasis on friendship than in any place I have heard of. There is the Claddagh ring, the Celtic Friendship Knot, and the Celtic concept of anam cara, the soul friend. Writers from the beginning of time have opined on friendship — Aristotle, Cicero, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Albert Camus, Maya Angelou, and on and on. No one would argue that having a close friend is one of life’s greatest gifts. Without such a relationship, life would be emptier, less safe, less interesting and, simply, lonelier. I often think this is one of those truths that exist in society’s unconscious.

In obituaries, we most often read that the deceased person is survived by a his or her family: a spouse, children, siblings, perhaps aunts and uncles, cousins — often a beloved pet. Almost never is an important friend mentioned. I would wager that the sorrow of someone’s closest friend is just as intense as that of a relative. Yet there is rarely a mention.

Don’t get me wrong: I would not want friendship to go the way of Mother’s or Father’s Day. Nor would I want it to be to be the center of an organized celebration. But I think if the importance and beauty of deep friendship could be brought into awareness more often, if we did not take it for granted, if we stopped every now and then to acknowledge its importance in our lives, if we elevated it into our collective consciousness, we would give our friends what they deserve. I would spare them greeting cards, but rather recommend that a real letter occasionally be written, not on any particular day, to express gratitude for having someone who accompanies you through life without contract or financial covenants, someone who sees you, who holds you dear no matter what befalls you. It seems to me that’s the least we could do.