The ecology of friendship

Apart from realising that I must be totally nuts to be doing this (a grand insight, worth at least six months of therapy), I am learning a few other things too. For one, I am learning that taking leave is not a word. It is a process. A long and complex one.

Firstly, I didn't realise that I would have to start saying my farewells so long before I actually left. And I wasn't ready for it when, a few months ago, my out-of-town school friends came to stay and when the time came for them to leave, standing in the middle of the driveway, it hit me that this would be the last visit for a long time, and that, months before our departure, I had to start saying goodbye.

Of course, it is not the kind of goodbye that one says on someone's deathbed; it is not a morbid fullstop; but it is poignant and sad and important to acknowledge that our friendship is changing, that it will now be nurtured through diligent correspondence rather than to-the-death 30 Seconds battles over late-night cheese and wine or impromptu Friday night braais ('Hi! What's in your fridge? I've got some wors and chicken, you got charcoal? We'll be right over').

We arranged to have farewell parties for the family and for our friends, and while organising social gatherings in the midst of the chaos of packing and sorting was a little hectic, I looked forward to hosting our favourite people for the last time - after all, our house lends itself to great parties! Now I've read Kubler-Ross and her cronies, and I know about stages of loss, but oddly enough I've read nothing of the literature on emigration, so my experience of the stages of this kind of taking leave is uninformed, except on a purely phenomenological level. The first thing I noticed was how little I realised how much our leaving affected the lives of our friends, and how it rippled out to touch people far and wide. Many of our friends dreaded the farewell party, some even cancelled at the last minute. I looked forward to the farewell party as a final fling in our house; they saw it as something more akin to a wake. I thought that life for them would go on; after all, my life was changing radically, theirs wasn't. I haven't experienced my role in their lives as being so pivotal as to cause trauma by removing my presence, yet they tell me that my going is devastating for them. I was puzzled by this: am I so important to them? Or is it what my leaving evokes in/for them - the questions they ask themselves, the inevitable self-examination, the resultant discomfort, unease? The answer is perhaps a great deal more complex. When someone touches your life and then leaves, it is not like taking a pebble out of a pond. When I leave, the gap that remains is never quite filled, because I bring something very particular to each relationship. Friends are replaceable; the kind of friendship they offer is not. The ecology of friendship is delicately balanced. And then of course, there is the fact that while I am the one whose life is changing, at least I have something to look forward to, to gain, in this process - adventure, a new life! - while my friends and family look forward only to loss and the emptiness of being left behind.

The ripple effect of our leaving was driven home to me in an unexpected and particularly painful way when school began last week, and Meghan-Faye's mother told me her little girl cried in the car all the way there because she knew that this term, her best friend Maya would not be there. All the other kids had already formed their cliques and found their own 'best friends', who would be her best friend now? Who would she play with? And gossip with in class? (At least they will no longer get sent to the headmistress - again - for nattering in class - in the first term of Grade 1 nogal. What a pair!)

So now I encourage Maya to practise her writing and computer skills by emailing Meghan-Faye and the other maatjies left behind. Where once was a joined-at-the-hip best friend and a giggling partner-in-crime, there is now that most diluted of relationships, a pen-pal. And while there is Skype and GoogleTalk, handwritten snailmail and postcards, blogs and email, and while there are the promises to visit and stay in contact and the certainty that time and distance will not erase the friendship, my leaving the fireside circle changes both the dance and the dancers. The dance will probably be neither better nor worse for my going, but the ecology has been upset. And when the balance is restored, the landscape will look different.

And while before I felt that I was the one traumatised by my loss (my friends were only losing one person, I was losing many), and that I was the one needing support, now I understand and stand in some awe, and with tremendous humility, before the shifting landscape of our lives, where such tiny tremors in the tectonic plates of our lives ripple and tear over the savannah and change its topography forever.

Penny