Dearly Departed

I lost an old friend yesterday. At 51 years young, and after thriving in remission for several years, the cancer returned in full resistance to any treatment, and on my husband’s birthday she lost the battle.

My first thought? I never got to say goodbye. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to her in a while. She had been in my thoughts and I’d been meaning to reach out but I was so consumed in my busy-ness of life that I just hadn’t made the time. If I had known she was in pallative care, I would have reached out earlier. I should have. But I didn’t, and now she’s gone.

As I sat getting slapped in the face by mortality, my mind spinning with flashes of the past 25 years of our friendship, I found myself thinking about my own life and how profoundly uncertain it is. All the things that I allow to consume my day-to-day life and, in the scheme of things, how truly insignificant most of them are. If I knew, finitely, that my time was nearly up would I think and act differently?

I wandered what my friend thought about in her final days; moments? Did she find peace in her heart or did she leave with some regret?

In the book, The Top 5 Regrets of Dying, pallative nurse Bronnie Ware documents the most common regrets expressed by the people she cared for during their impending demise. The book reveals consistently-reported insight about what people care most about and during her years of work she discovered how significant these regrets were. The common thread was being less busy and living more present.

Daily life is busy for everyone as we are juggling more than ever before. Career development, wealth creation, bigger better homes, training & exercise, kids schedules & activities, social calendars and the constant pressure from the disconnected-connection to social media. And in this world of instant-gratification we are certainly less patient and more easily offended leading us to higher rates of stress and anxiety.

In this busy-ness of life, we can sometimes lose sight of what is really important to our fundamental happiness. The death of someone dear often forces us to focus on what we care about the most and today I’m doing that. I’m thinking about how I could positively address what’s really important while I still have the gift of time, my health and…life.

We were friends for a long time. We bickered and disagreed, we laughed and experienced a lot of life together. We worked together, travelled together, we shared many a meal and talked for hours on the phone about nothing.

She was there when I met my future husband, got my first tattoo and when I had my daughter. I was there through her marriage, her career move into nutrition and her emotional search for a father she never knew. I was there for her initial cancer diagnosis right before we headed out to watch Beyonce in concert.

We were good friends. Great friends.

If I could rewind the time, there are so many things I would say to her before she left this world.

I would tell her I’m sorry. She fought through a lot of personal challenges in her life and I never fully gave her the support and compassion she deserved.

I would tell her that I loved her. In the course of our entire friendship I don’t think I ever said those words to her.

I would say thank you. She was there to support me through my own life challenges big and small.

I would tell her that I forgive her; for all the little things and I would ask her forgiveness for those same little things that we chose to hold on to.

It seems the humble friendship is collateral damage to this externally-focussed, future oriented world we live in. More and more commonly, friendships are defined by status. It’s about who you know, how many you know, who you want to ’appear’ to be associated with – and it all comes at the cost of losing the value in the true gift of having a friendship that is dependent on nothing other than a genuine and mutual want to be a part of each others’ story.

I’ve never been one to define my friendships by quantity or status but rather by the depth of my one-on-one connection with people; a virtue I occasionally lose sight of in my busy pursuit of network-building that society keeps preaching as modern life’s gospel.

But today, I’m monumentally recalling the value of pure old-school friendship and I’m so grateful to have experienced it in my lifetime with my friend.

If I could rewind time for just one last minute, I would tell her that myself.

Goodbye dear friend.

Mina Iacono author, business-owner and old-school friend

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