I don't know what friendship is: reflections on losing a friend... twice.

I'm stingy with the word "friend." For me it has always held, deep in its beating heart, a certain level of commitment, a willingness to make time and space. But maybe I'm missing the point.

My desk is littered with soggy tissues and Emmylou Harris is crooning on repeat: To dust be returning, from dust we began. The song is about the death of her father, the things she never asked about, the skills she never learned from him.

Last week I changed the name of this newsletter to Tell Me Something True. It seems I’m being asked to leap, full body, into the energy of that new moniker. So, I’ll tell you something true. I’m sitting with feelings and thoughts about a woman named Shannon. A woman who was my friend, and then wasn’t, and then was again.

I’m thinking about the things I never got to ask her, the insights I’ll never get to hear. I’m wondering where I was when Shannon took her last breath. Was I in a meeting at Barnes & Noble? Or maybe getting my brows waxed? Where was I? A minor detail of grief. As if geolocating would help me better understand the way the tears keep flash flooding and my heart suddenly aches.

At first her death was just a rumor. The husband of a friend from Washington State had heard from friends in San Diego: Shannon passed. Very sudden. She’d gone to the doctor recently and been told she was dying. She had maybe a week.

She was my age. It doesn’t happen like that. The whole thing was obviously absurd. I couldn’t grasp it, my body kept getting chills but the information sheered off my brain.

I called my mom. She agreed. It was unbelievable. Is she someone people gossip about? Is she famous? my mom asked. A ridiculous and yet reasonable question given the way we play whisper down the lane on social media, particularly with celebrity news.

I couldn’t find any info on line. Shannon had stopped using her personal social media accounts years back and I didn’t have her husband’s phone number. So I did the only thing I could think of: I texted her.

Coffee? I asked.

During the lockdowns, she and I would meet at an outdoor cafe. When it was cold, we’d bundle in coats and scarves against the wind coming off the French Broad river. When it rained, we’d sip our coffee and shout over the pounding on the metal roof of the pavilion in the picnic area. Even though the weathered wooden bench was hard enough to make my butt cheeks fall asleep, hours would spin by as we dissected the crazy times in which we found ourselves living.

There’s a dance I sometimes do with people—steps I think many of us twirl through as opinions have gotten more and more bifurcated—feeling out a person’s social and political proclivities before stating our own. But Shannon was a lightening rod. She grounded ideas, remaining calm and true as the chaos of creation swirled around her. Once I knew she’d never be offend by my thoughts, I would say anything, allowing my philosophies to alchemize in the autumn air.

Which was why I was able to dismantle our friendship so easily. There was no rancor. There was only this is what I need; it’s different from what you need.

This was the first time I lost Shannon.

I don’t remember the details of the phone call in which I unraveled us, but I have the emails we exchanged months later, when we began feeling our way toward a new way of relating to each other. Below is an excerpt of our conversations on friendship, what it means and how we navigate it.

Note: Shannon was the founder of an organization for women dealing with addiction and trauma using holistic and, what was at the time considered to be, alternative methods to wellness. She was often interviewed and on podcasts where she would expound upon precepts she thought would help others to self-reflect and grow.

I’ve edited the emails below. What remains is a conversation I feel certain Shannon would want heard because it might help all of us question our own rules, break stale habits, and open wider to ourselves and each other.

Me: I’m sorry that our attempts at a deeper friendship didn’t align.  The experience reminded me that, even when people are simpatico, they don’t always have the same ideas about what a friendship is. Chewing on this has led to some interesting conversations with various circles of women in my life. Those conversations, in turn, have led to a small group of friends consciously deciding to deepen our commitment to each other.

So the jarring experience you and I had has transformed on my end. And I hope that it has transformed in some way for you as well.

I will always be up for a cup of tea and a chat when it fits into both of our schedules.

Shannon: Friendship is not a light thing for me. I'm a lifer in friendship- when I feel that connection I tend to stick, across distance, difficulty and life stages. Thank you for being that, for helping me land, find roots, for curious and interesting conversation. For laughter, for telling me I could be myself even when my work was insane. And now for gently letting me know that we are not really friends but can remain connected in some kind of warm way.

Me: In terms of friendships, I am careful. In high school, I was many peoples secret friend—I wasn’t included in the daily doings but was called in when someone hit a rough patch. This one sided type of friendship, where I made myself available according to someone else’s needs and schedule, although they weren't doing the same for me, is not something I’m willing to do as an adult. 

When you messaged that you are most comfortable with friends who are flowy and who will fit in when you don’t have work, I understood that we need different things from a friendship. The people in my life who flow in and out on their own schedule are lovely… and if I happen to be free and it doesn’t feel stressful, its invigorating to grab a tea and catch-up with them. But I stopped making time— creating a pocket of emptiness— for those folks many years ago because I learned the hard way that they rarely will do the same for me. 

There are many folks in my life like this… and language lets me down in knowing what to call them. Colloquially, most would say “friend.” But my heart is stingy with that word, reserving it for the people I can count on, and who, in turn, can count on me. Maybe it’s like the Eskimo’s having 80 words for snow: I need some extra syllables to make sense of different types of friendship, of simply being simpatico in the moments of connection.

All this to say: I will look forward to the next simpatico moment.

Shannon: This quite literally I have written:

“In high school, I was many peoples secret friend: I wasn’t included in the daily doings but was called in when someone hit a rough patch. This one sided type of friendship, where I made myself available according to someone else’s needs and schedule, although they weren't doing the same for me, is not something I’m willing to do as an adult.”

Also, feelings about the word friend and how to language about the many types of connection! No surprise.

To clarify - when I said flowy I did not mean to convey on my time, when it's convenient or I feel like it. I meant more - I don't always know how to commit to my friends AND handle my shifting, committed and sometimes in a real way "urgent" work. So I get scared to commit because I don't want to have to change and let people down.

This is all material I'm working with because as you said to me - my work is me, in that it's my dharma, literally part of my soul and health. Yet, so are friendships and community. So, this tension is a worthwhile one, because it's about feeding two things that are critical to me and my life.

Just this dialogue is invaluable. Even if it came with some jolting, heart sinking and sadness. I hate that I hurt, disappointed or jolted you. Yet, I'm also grateful to get to learn, grow and try.

That was Shannon: always so grateful to get to learn and grow and try.

I wonder now—now that I know that it’s true, that she died last week of liver cancer diagnosed at the last possible instant—how many conversations I might have missed by not being more open in my definition of friendship. On the other hand, I don’t know that we ever would have delved into the realm of relationships and how we manage them if we hadn’t had this particular hiccup.

What is friendship? Is it connection? Moral obligation? A feeling you hold in your heart? An action you take in the world?

How do we flex so we can allow for each other’s different experience and definitions? How do we create eighty words to describe the throbbing aliveness we feel when we deeply resonate with someone else?

I’m pondering these questions as I pick through the soggy pile of tissues on my desk, searching for a dry corner.

Does friendship survive death?

Yesterday I heard Shannon’s voice clarion clear. She told me to do whatever I needed to do to get comfortable with having the conversations she and I used to have in private, out here in public. I immediately, incongruously, thought: I need to get those sunspots on my face lasered. Perhaps my subconscious thinks I’m going to be having these conversations on the Today show. Shannon would have laughed. In fact, I can hear it, her full belly laugher.

Whether that’s her spirit or my imagination talking doesn’t matter really matter. The electric energy of our connection is still throbbing through me.

Perhaps that, after all, is the true definition of friendship.

xx Maia

P.S. One more thought from Shannon:

I'm so excited you are writing. That is part of my goal this winter. To continue to write. Once I got rest, I actually got a chance to witness the material alive in me, coming out in all this consulting and training. I realized that not only does it deserve to be written down, I want to. I want to wrestle the wild beast of writing. :)

My memorial to you, my friend, will be to continue to wrestle with this wild writing beast. To get the spirit of our conversations— the uncensored openness and willingness to look at life from all angles—down on the page. I’m not going to pretend it will be easy. But I’m ready to try.

Rest in peace.