Anam cara
On friendship, sickness, and life
In the bleak years after college when the prospect of any kind of meaningful career seemed dismal and every piece of writing I submitted to a magazine fell into the howling void of a slush pile, I dated a lot of assholes. Assholes were my type, as were losers, drunks, guys who lived in their cars, heroin addicts, the whole 90s landscape of awful men. The biggest asshole of all, a guy who was such an asshole that multiple people expressed relief when he died, used to write remarkably cruel song lyrics about me, one of which included the line “she’s not even a popular bitch.”
As much as this was the kind of observation made by a truly unrepentant asshole, I have to admit that it is to some degree true. Unlike every woman in movies and on TV who gets breast cancer and seemingly has five dozen women friends who have no family, career or challenges of their own and can exist only to be supporting characters in her life, I have instead a small group of friends of many genders I’m intensely loyal to. Getting cancer also has the unfortunately clarifying effect of revealing that some people cannot handle a friend who gets sick.
Beatriz Blum, a volunteer with the Shanti project, a mutual aid group that provided community care during the AIDS epidemic. Image via Jstor Daily.
Part of me accepts that this is just how our culture handles reminders of death. Now that I am “the friend with cancer,” that reminder is me, and because I’m also relatively young for cancer, it’s not a pleasant reminder in my peer group, many of whom are also dealing with sick and dying parents. Nobody wants to see their friend bald from chemo or covered in radiation burns, but I put on a hat, cranked up my sense of humor, steered conversations away from mortality, and did my best to be a normal person in the worst months of treatment. Which, coincidentally, were a year ago this month, when chemo decimated my immune system and I felt so ill I could barely have a conversation.
Recently the NYT ran an article about the “medium friend” or the “B list friend,” the person you’re not super close to who still asks for your support. My reaction to this article was visceral. So now we’re sorting our friends into categories, another capitalistic way to optimize our lives? And of course one of the examples of a medium friend was the person you bond with over a breast cancer diagnosis. My friend with breast cancer is dead, and my friend who was diagnosed with gall bladder cancer just weeks after my own diagnosis is also dead, so good luck with that.
The article irritated me with its pop psychology reassurances that you’re not a bad person if you don’t respond to a “medium friend” who reaches out because Americans think everyone they spend time with is a friend, so I wandered into the comments to see if others shared this reaction. And that’s where I read this:
I am a late-60 year old woman who feels like she has no really good friends. (I do have 2 close sisters and a husband who has become simply a friend.) I am terribly lonely, and I often wonder why I don't have "top-tier" friends. It's awkward to BE the medium friend too. If I do something that feels too effusive, it's embarrassing / disappointing. For instance, [a] friend's mom died recently, and I brought her dinner. Then I worried that she had never contacted me when my parents died or when I had surgery. When I feel I may have overstepped my boundary, I then worry that is why people don't want to be "good" friends with me. It always comes back to me examining and blaming myself. It's exhausting and sad.
This comment mirrors what going from being the person who does a lot for others to being the friend with cancer is like. You start second guessing everything. You wonder how many people would show up at your funeral, and if the crashing waves of anxiety and depression that follow a cancer diagnosis mean you’re no longer a likable person. You throw yourself into work because maintaining health insurance is now crucial, especially in light of the incoming administration likely eviscerating the ACA and Medicare, and working hard means being so exhausted you wonder if you’re not a very good friend any more.
But this notion that some friends are B list and some are A list seems like narcissism. Sure, during the worst days of the pandemic we all missed our third places and casual connections with the guy at the coffee shop (shoutout to Jorge), but isn’t anyone we open up to who reciprocates that a friend? Aren’t we lucky to be loved at all? Each of us is by nature the center of our own universe, but in these days when loneliness is an actual social epidemic, every single person who cares about you matters. Everyone who hopes for your wellbeing is a treasure. Some even care more deeply because you have walked right up to the edge of your own grave, looked into it and realized that your life has been shaped by the love of other people. And when they someday share that experience, if you’re still around, you’ll be the person who stands with them at the edge, holding on.