A Few Good Friends

If you live long enough, you will lose more than a few good friends. Some while you live and others when they die.

Ironically, funerals bring together family and friends who you and I may have gone years without seeing. Losing a friend, we press the pause button long enough to reflect on the way friend connections keep us going till we’re gone.

Consider how God uses friends to shape our lives, as someone described friendship.

“Friends for a season

Friends for a reason

Friends for life”

F*R*I*E*N*D*S

If you watched the sitcom Friends when it was the number one show on TV during its ten years, 1994–2004, Matthew Perry needs no introduction. He played Chandler. He was Chandler. Matthew himself says, ”I was Chandler.”

In his recently released memoir, Matthew tells how he landed the coveted role that changed his life. The show also changed the lives of every cast member of that remarkably successful ensemble.

You may wonder how and why someone with so many advantages became an alcoholic and drug user. It’s not a pretty story.

Now that Matthew is sober and drug-free, he tells his story to help other addicts. In fact, helping someone else is number twelve in the Twelve Step program in Alcoholics Anonymous.[1] The first step is admitting powerlessness, and when Matthew hit bottom, God responded to his cry for help.

Matty, as he is known to his friends, says all he has been through compelled him to write about his survival. One of his friends describes his story as ”A raw, unflinching memoir that took courage to write.” [2] His story is literally gut-wrenching. He begins his story when his colon exploded.

As is often the case with memoir read by the author, I listened on Audible first and then got the book. Hearing him tell his story, I also heard an interview where he said that reading what he had written was harder than writing it. Matthew describes how nothing filled the hole in his soul. Not fame. Not drugs. Not money that he spent on therapy and rehabs.

But he knows he could not have made it through the hell he has been through without his friends.

Another Book about Friendship

Crossing to Safety chronicles the friendship between two couples, the Morgans and the Langs, over the course of forty-plus years. The couple who enjoyed a life of wealth, privilege, and status invited the other couple who lacked all those things into their lives.

“… Both of us were peculiarly susceptible to friendship. When the Langs opened their house and their hearts to us, we crept gratefully in.

Crept? Rushed. Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire. Crowded in, rubbing our hands with satisfaction, and we were never the same thereafter. Thought better of ourselves. Thought better of the world.”

Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner

The main character, a college professor, ties his feelings to a quote by Henry James that he stumbled on in the Berkeley library, ”Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.”

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I can relate. And I thank God for the friends He has brought into my life, order into the chaos, the warmth and goodness that led me to think better of the world. And of myself.

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“If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Eventless as our life was, it swept us along.”

Crossing to Safety

Despite having filled numerous journals with moments from my life, Stegner is right to say that life itself feels like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. So fast, and we are each of us swept along.

These characters experience joys alongside hardships, setbacks, disappointments, disillusionment, conflict, and unforeseeable losses––endured with the help of friends.

At a particular crisis, the character telling their story said, “We lay there cutting the future into happy stars and circles like girls making Christmas cookies.”

And don’t we all wish the future held only the moments that make us happy?

The Accountable Life Leading to An Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner’s colleagues, his friends, and his son Page Stegner contributed to a book written about him, a book that extols “what one man has taught us, by his example, about the accountable life; a book about what it means to be a responsible, loving, thoughtful, constituent of the human race. That is the only way he would have it.”[4]

Friendships can hold us accountable to live a better life.

Wallace Stegner[3] won the Pulitzer for Angle of Repose, a novel about the American West.[4] A literary masterpiece of story-telling, this remains one of my top ten favorite novels.

In this story, the angle of repose title comes from use as a mining term that describes how materials poured into a mound come to rest without further sliding.

”A book is only as good as it is timely.”

Stegner used material taken from a book, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, by Mary Hallock Foote, who married a mining engineer and moved from New York to the West in the 1860’s. Both books reveal how writing letters nurtured and kept alive friendships.

Many readers think Crossing to Safety is Stegner’s best novel. When I read Crossing to Safety years ago, soon after reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, I was at the wrong place and wrong time in life to appreciate its subtlety.

When loaning or recommending a book, I repeat, ”A book is only as good as it is timely.”

Disappointments and Loss Can Be God’s Appointment

“You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.”

Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner

Reading Crossing to Safety and Matthew Perry’s memoir at the same time helped me see parallels between the miracle of friendship and how these sustain us throughout life.

Friendship knits together souls, using threads of both joy and sorrow.

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

Ecclesiastes 7:2

Funerals serve as reminders that life is brief and fragile and the certainty of death awaits everyone.

Memorial services for friends provide occasion to reconnect with other friends and to take to heart our own mortality.

Much more than that, as we count the loss, we can also count the gains from unique friendships that brought us to where we are now and helped make us who we have become.

P.S. Remembering Henry J. Harnly who lived to help others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program#Twelve_Steps

[2] Marta Kauffman, co-creator of NBC’s sitcom Friends, from the back cover of his book

[3] Stegner taught at Stanford, University of Utah, University of Wisconsin and Harvard. He started the Creative Writing program at Stanford, and among others with distinguished writing careers, his students included Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, and Edward Abbey.

[4] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-feb-03-op-fradkin3-story.html

[5] https://wallacestegner.org/bio.html