Life's Real Bounty: Friends

Debbie Gardecki Kropp, '79 forwarded this article from the November 21, 2007 issue of USA Today. She said that the article was the perfect expression of how much her Wagner friends mean to her. And although it's after Thanksgiving, the sentiment is always timely. Enjoy!

Life's real bounty: Friends
Their value is never clearer than the moment we fear losing them
By Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg

On Thanksgiving, families gather together and express gratitude for the bounty in their lives.

But what is a family these days? Of course, it's parents, children and siblings — blood relatives. But with American families becoming so mobile, so scattered and so displaced, many people form close family-like attachments to friends, making them siblings by choice, brothers and sisters of life.

Perhaps this year, the prosperity we celebrate at Thanksgiving should not only be for the material riches of our lives but also for the human ones. After all, the bounty of living may not just be the abundance of goods spilling out of the cornucopia of life, but the richness of the relationships we have cultivated and harvested in our lifetime.

In recent studies, scientists have found that close friendships are very important factors to our health. In a longevity study in Australia, researchers found that a network of good friends was more important than family and economic prosperity in increasing the length of a person's life, especially among the aged. Friends help each other weather the vicissitudes of life — death of spouses, bouts of poor health, and so on. Other studies have indicated that friends reduce stress and provide emotional support through inevitable ups and downs.

'Giggling like sisters'

The importance of close friends came into sharp focus for me last Thanksgiving after doctors had detected life-threatening illnesses in three of my best friends. When I bent my head to give thanks last year, all I could think about was how lucky I was to know them — how life's real bounty was embedded in them, not just in the material prosperity around me.

Take my oldest friend, Linda. I first met Linda when my family moved into the house across the street from hers in 1955, one of those incredibly fortunate turns of fate. Linda and I couldn't have been more different. She was a neat-as-a-pin pretty blonde surrounded with beautiful dolls while I was a plump, feisty brunette, interested in horses and westerns. Our mothers shook their heads when they saw us together — giggling like sisters, inseparable. The eddies of life would separate us, of course, as we married and moved away. But our friendship — how we felt about each other — hasn't changed in a half-century. When the doctors diagnosed advanced cancer in Linda last year, it was as if a guillotine were suspended over my own life. Linda taught me to ride a bike. Now she is teaching me so much about courage.

Then, Vicki, a close friend of my college years, was threatened by heart troubles. Happily, that turned out to be treatable with medicines and medical procedures. Yet when I was on a road trip with Vicki just after her diagnosis, I stayed up all night listening to her breathe, fearing apnea and the cessation of her great heart. I remembered in the darkness of that night how I first met her when she came into the dorm from the skating class from hell in 1967 — how her pants had ripped from knee to knee, and she tried to skate with her thighs pressed tightly together against the freezing cold. We laughed and laughed about that madcap misadventure and many others since. That laughter has echoed across four decades. What would I do without her?

Then there's Joyce. We went through 35 years of child-rearing together — through husbands, children, parents, siblings and hectic family life that sometimes made no sense. But it wasn't important that they made sense, only that we could share the whole panoramic march through womanhood together, a no-holds-barred life conversation. When Joyce had a serious heart procedure done a couple years ago during the holiday season, I flew across half a continent to decorate her house and bake her Christmas cookies. But mostly I just wanted to be with her, to soothe the chief anxiety in my own soul: the thought that she was mortal, perishable, and that our life conversation might end. Just the thought of that sent me flying through the gates of the nearest airport.

'Our chosen family'

Everyone has gathered best friends — an old school chum here, a trusted colleague from work there, or some wonderful person met by pure happenstance. These friends are people we can confide in, speak our hearts to — and to whom we listen intently for solace, inspiration and advice. They are our chosen family — the brothers and sisters of our souls — who clarify and define who we are, what we are doing. And these friendships never change: To speak after a decade's separation is the same as speaking just yesterday, time and distance rendered meaningless in our life journey together.

When we sit down to our feast of Thanksgiving this year, we should give thanks for that other family, that chosen family — our human harvest of enduring friendships. And they're easy to name, too. They're the ones who made a difference. "No love, no friendship," wrote Nobel Prize winner Francois Mauriac, "can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever."

Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg lives near Houston and is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Comments

[Dana Williams]

What a wonderful article. It re-enforces how important friendships are and makes me want to pick up the phone.