I was reading this interview with Chris Rock, and paused towards the end in thought:
Who do you hang with these days? Who’s your peer group?
I hang with Dave [Chappelle]. I hang with my kids. I hang with Nelson George. There’s not a lot of hanging in the Covid world. The better question is, who do you FaceTime with?
So who do you FaceTime with?
The other day I realized I’ve never met an elderly person that was cared for by their friends. Every elderly person I know that’s got any trouble is cared for by a spouse or a child. Sometimes they have like five kids but only one helps. Where are your friends? Your friends are probably not going to be there when it really counts. [Laughs.] When my dad was dying in the hospital, where were his friends? My grandmother, where were her friends? Don’t get me wrong, you get sick in your 20s, your friends will come to the hospital. It’s an adventure. [Laughs.] You get sick in your 60s, they farm it out. “You go Wednesday and I’ll go Sunday.”
Enjoy them while you have them. But if you think your friends are your long-term solution to loneliness, you’re an idiot.
On one side of my family, there are a group of cousins who are fiercely devoted to each other. No one else in the world matters except for their siblings and their families. They doted on their mother in her final days, never leaving her alone, even when she was in the nursing home for a year.
These cousins are no longer youngsters. During this horrific year, a number of them have passed. One has sat shiva three times this year.
They are of the age when friends (if they had them) would no longer be showing up to assist. For them, from the beginning, it was only family; at the end, there is only family.
"Your flesh and blood," Ma would chastise when us kids would fight. "How can you hurt your own flesh and blood?"
Friendships are nice, as Rock says. They have their place. But when I see others cast off their family because of "friends," that these friends are now their everything, I wonder how tight that bond is, how long it can last.
Rock is 55, old enough to contemplate his mortality and wonder what is truly important in life. Obviously if a family member is toxic it is best to keep one's distance, but one cannot deny the connection family has, whereas friendships rarely last into the caregiving stage.
Han and I joke to Ben that he should please not shove us into a cut-rate nursing home when the time comes. Because it'll be his problem when we are old and creaky (but with excellent skin, because of the creams we use now), and no one else, no matter how "close," will want to take it on.
2 comments:
Yes and no. My father for sure was there for his childhood friend through his illness and death, so was my mom (who didn't even like the man that much most of the time). My grandmother-in-law's friends still visit her (well, before Covid), such of them as are alive- and their daughters do too. And when I was a chaplain, I did see patients who had steady streams of friends visiting, day in and day out. Is it as common? No, for sure not. But I also had a patient who was in the hospital for 9 months, and who I visited regularly. Her sibling came to see her 1 time in all that time.
Mostly what I take away from it all is that investment in a relationship- family or friendship- is not as common as we think, and that only the person themselves can guess who is safe/likely to rely upon. Family may be a safer bet, but I don't think it's the only one.
That is nice to hear! Maybe that's how we should invest in our friendships—keep them so close they won't abandon us in our sickly old age. ;)
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