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A Question of Friendship
Why do friends die before you do?
Why do friends die before you do? I don’t mean mortal death, although that happens frequently when you are over 80, as I am. I mean the eraser younger friends yield to rub you out of their lives once you have become irrelevant to them.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the many wonderful friends I have had in my long life. Indeed, I have paid tribute to many of them (Dead Friends and Living Memories) and hope to write about others before the grim reaper trashes my laptop.
I don’t mean to demean the attentions of my family members. They do their best to tolerate my lame humor and my love for them — and even the most remote sometimes keep in touch. I appreciate any effort they may make to squeeze me into their young(er) and busy lives.
Nor do I want to disparage the handful of former colleagues and friends who check in and out online. I may be one of the most senior geezers on Facebook and I visit every morning to celebrate birthdays and share snippets of our lives with my “friends.”
I am not sure why more than a handful of my several hundred FB friends ever mention me but I’d like to think it has something to do with the site’s mystical thing called an algorithm.
