Friendship continues uninterrupted

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Nov. 10, 2004. Jack writes about the power of friendship. That message remains incredibly important today and every day. It’s crucial to our lives that we have friends — those we see every day and those we reconnect with every once in a while. If you have a friend you’ve lost touch with, let Jack’s words be an inspiration to reach out and rekindle a conversation.

Some friendships require effort.

Others sustain themselves.

You know the ones I’m talking about, those friendships which can be disrupted by years and hundreds of miles but are renewed as easily as a conversation that has been momentarily interrupted.

That’s the sort of friendship we’ve had over the years with Kathy and Dave.

Its roots go back to college, when Kathy and my wife Connie were roommates for three years. I didn’t really know Dave then, though I’d seen him around the campus.

He lived in a different dorm and was a couple of classes ahead of me.

It wasn’t until he and Kathy found each other that we got to know the two of them together.

Even then, the friendship was one of those interrupted by the complications of daily life and paths which took us in different directions. But it was always self-sustaining, interruptible but irrevocable.

I think back to their wedding in 1982. Though Connie and Kathy had been out of touch for a while, we had no hesitation about driving to Pennsylvania for the event. It was a marriage which faced incredible challenges from the start, but it was one that you knew was going to succeed, a case where the whole of their life together was greater than the sum of its parts.

Sure, there were folks who had misgivings.

Dave had been dealing with muscular dystrophy since age 12. It had slowed him down in college and put him on crutches as a young man. By the time they were wed, when he was 34, Dave was using a motorized cart to get around because his legs had failed him.

He was still using the cart one memorable weekend, I think it was 1984, when he and Kathy came to our house in Portland for a visit. We were joined by two other friends — another of Connie’s college buddies and her husband from Ohio — and that couple’s two kids.

The house was full for a couple of delightful nights full of talk and laughter and more talk.

The discussion moved back and forth between two topics — our mutual concern about our parents and our concern about our children.

My father had died the year before, and Connie’s had been knocked down by a series of strokes.

One thing we did not talk about was Dave’s illness. It wasn’t a point he dwelled upon much. It was simply the life he’d been dealt, and he was going to play every hand.

We later learned that Kathy was pregnant when they had visited. Jefferson would be their first child, and their daughter Rachel would follow.

Caught up in raising our families, we fell back on those old methods of communication: Christmas letters and random moments when our paths crossed and the interrupted conversation was resumed seamlessly.

Our last visit to their home was about seven or eight years ago.

Dave’s situation had worsened mightily. He was bedfast by then and was on a respirator. All of us knew there are limits to how long the human body can be kept alive under those conditions.

Dave defeated those limits.

When he died the last Sunday in October, he had been on a ventilator for 14 years. The usual limit is seven.

On Saturday, the conversation resumed again, right where it left off. The self-sustaining friendship was renewed at Dave’s memorial service.

It was a day of tears, of laughter and of humbled awe at the strength Dave brought to life and the depth of Kathy’s love through trying times.

At the memorial service, one of Dave’s former pastors recalled stopping by the Sunday school class Dave taught. The class was doing some exercise where questions were randomly drawn and people were to answer with the unvarnished truth.

The question Dave drew was this: If he could change one thing about his life and live it over again, what would it be?

His answer, the pastor said, was instantaneous: There was absolutely nothing he would change. He had lived a wonderful life and wouldn’t have altered a single detail.

Trapped in a body that was letting him down, faced with an inexorable decline by painful inches, he could have been expected to lash out. At the very least, he could have been expected to say he would have preferred a life of perfect health.

But he didn’t. He had lived, he said, a wonderful life.

And thanks to his wisdom, the conversation — and our friendship — will continue uninterrupted from now on.