It's very hard to lose parents and friends as you go through your life! Grief letter from 2006 regarding my earliest childhood friend that died at age 62

I think one of the hardest things we have to do in life is to survive the deaths of our parents and relatives and closest friends. However, if you live to be 70 or more it's pretty much a given that you might lose your parents, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles and some of your cousins as well as some of your friends. This letter my wife and I thought was a good one that I wrote to the Sister of my best childhood friend from my age 6 from Sunday School at age 62. I was a few years younger so I would have been 58 in 2006. Deaths of your friends and peers is sort of unthinkable until it happens and makes us all feel very mortal in the process. Sharing this is part of how we survive these insurmountable losses to our lives.

By God's Grace

Letter Written October 7th 2006

Dear Friends,

Thank you for sending me the DVD of Richard's life. my wife and I sat there and cried together watching it. It was very sweet. I had just returned from Palm Springs where my son lives. I had gone there to try to get well and to try to avoid bronchiits which can be very serious for me since I had my heart virus in 1998. It is now Saturday and so I think I succeeded. By the way the DVD is in a format that is used ONLY for computers so it cannot be run on a DVD player. I thought that might be important to people less technically savvy than myself. The best way I know to access it on one's IBM Clone computer would be to go to the CD drive and access it directly from there. If you remember my first job out of college was as a computer programmer and opertator. That was when I bought my new 1968 Camaro. Since then computers, especially microcomputers have been a hobby of mine and in his 20s my son was a Computer Tech before he started studying to become a Nurse and get his Bachelor of Science in Nursing here in Califonria. He is one of the best computer techs I have ever seen both on hardware and software.

I realized this week I have been writing as a way of staying alive physically. When your brother died it was like the last straw that broke the camel's back. I had a lot of sympathy for what Richard was going through at the end because I have been overwhelmed the last few years myself by various family problems that have seemed irresolvable. Thank God, Finances are not a problem, By God's Good Grace. However, my mother, my wife's Dad, my 17 year old daughter, my son't problems with his wife who no longer lives with him, etc. The list goes on and on. Anyway, Richard's passing broke me. I have watched myself going from the capacity to still think of myself as a young man to an old man preparing for death. I can still snow ski, ride bicycles and motorcycles and all that but I was really crushed by Richard's passing. Richard was the only male being left in my life that I could talk to about literally anything without being judged in some way. I think his experience with me was likely the same.

So, the loss of a friend like this is incalculable. The last person like this in my life would have been my father. But even he would judge me first before he would listen and then forgive me for whatever I had done.

 

End of real letter to the sister of my earliest best friend who had died. Though she is married now and living in Texas we had dated for a couple of years from 1965 to 1967 when I was 17 to 19 years of age. Also, I had known her and my brother from Sunday School in Church since I was 6 years old. 

In 2011 my best friend in High School who I had given my newspaper route to at age 10 passed away. I remember then in 2011 I was at a hotel in Bakersfield with my wife and son who were there to support me and I couldn't speak for most of the day I was so upset to lose another friend from my childhood and teen years.

Though I still have a friend that traveled and met my then wife and children in Nepal from Switzerland where he was playing concerts then who is still alive and most of the years since then we have still skied together on Mt. Shasta in the winter and gone 4 wheel driving together there in the mountains in my truck it has been unbelievably hard to lose those two very old friends one from age 6 and one from age 10 in my life. MY friend presently alive I didn't get to know well until I was 21 and started climbing mountains and rock climbing with him.

The point of all this is learning to live with the loss of your friends and loved ones is one of the hardest things to learn to do (to go on living without them).

By God's Grace