Unfortunately all these changes in life due to covid would eventually end our friendship leaving me without one of my "go-to" people to share jokes, stories and sometimes even tears, compounded by the fact I still have to work with this person (though not directly very frequently). As I tell other people the details of the story, I universally get a response like "I had a friend ghost me" or "I haven't talked to one of my bridesmaids in six months". It's really not what I expected. And rarely is it a political difference or masker vs. anti-masker thing. Usually it's not even a "thing". It's just the times. The complete change in most people's social lives is difficult. I imagine my 90+ year old grandmother who has seen a handful of people (not me) since March. But even children who are in school, their social lives revolve more around electronic devices than we could have imagined in 2019. It can be some people's only social outing.
I've read and re-read Tara Brach's "Radical Acceptance" a few times. I think of the finiteness of relationships. Everything on earth ends. It's hard to think of a father-son relationship, for example, not being infinite. The affects of a relationship can last a lifetime but the bond between two people does have a start and an end. It's a horrible thought but it must be accepted in order to truly appreciate the time with people.
The end of my friendship with the coworker is sad. There was cruelty, there was dependency. There was a closed door and finality. The finality is probably the hardest thing for me. No one is going to fill that void. I asked her not to contact me a couple days after I'd witnessed a fatal car accident (a story for another day) after her response toward me and the accident. I reached out to her two months or so later and the response was silence. Finality. It's sad to think that I'll probably never share something with her again that pretty much only she and I would laugh at. I also have no idea what she's doing in life now which is strange as well. It was so sudden and also, initiated by me. I thought it was a break and it became an end. It's stranger still that we still work for the same small company and avoid each other. We still share some friends outside of work.
"every relationship of every type has a start and end, no matter how long or special that period is in between when it’s active. The best relationships are the ones where once it is over you can see the positives and how much better you are for having known each other."
There have been times where I can look back with some appreciation of what this friendship was like for me without feeling bad at its completion. It's not the worst thing I dealt with in 2020, for certain, but I'm going to feel guilt because this was one thing I could have avoided. I could have made the friendship work; I was aware of where it was going. I'd be open to resuming a friendship with her, but I won't pursue it. And I'm also aware, there is likely no chance she will pursue it either. As she once said to me (to paraphrase) the people in life you can be comfortable with can come and go and sometimes they are replaced. But there's no replacing this.
I always talk about the post-covid times as "The Great Restart". It's a re-start, not a thawing out where things are pretty much the same as they were before but maybe with a bit of a freezer-burn taste; everything is different now. And while the dormancy period of the pandemic did strengthen many relationships, especially within my family, there's one that is completely gone.
The takeaway here is that Covid19 affected us in many ways we could never have realized. But a bright-side comment here is this: the relationships that grew stronger are the ones that are the most important going forward.
