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One of my best friends had been in the hospital in New York for way too long when she emailed recently and said, "Could you come?"
Of course I could come. That's what friends do for each other. They ask. They give. I went.
In the waning light of a fall afternoon, I found her in a hospital chair, dressed in a hospital gown, attached to a tube here, a tube there, tubes, it seemed, everywhere. There's nothing like a mess of plastic hospital tethers to remind you how freely the healthy and physically able move through the world, and how fast that liberty can be stolen.
I leaned down to hug her. This, I thought, is a new phase of friendship, a phase as inevitable as time. One of us would have gotten sick first, eventually. Fate chose her.
She looked up at me with a wan smile.
"I'm giving you your novel," she said.
Now that's a friend.
A friend is someone who knows you so well that she anticipates what you might want, and who even in the midst of her own trouble offers it.
Honestly, I have no intention of writing a novel of any kind, but I knew what she was saying, one journalist to another, which was: If you need to process this by making it into a story, that's OK.
If I were going to write a novel about this episode of her life and mine, the theme would be the nature of long friendships, these relationships forged outside the demands and expectations of family, these chosen connections that survive ups and downs, differences and distances. That famous children's song - "Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold" - gets more meaningful as you get older.
Your old friends are the ones who knew you when you were both still a little crazy, willing to take more risks of all kinds than you would be later. They remember the dreams that decades down the line you would either have fulfilled or abandoned.
They're the friends who have known you long enough that they could publicly embarrass you if they wanted, but they wouldn't.
Often, they're the friends who met your parents, whose parents you met. They knew you before either of you were wrapped in the duties and identities that later in life would brand you in the world. You've seen each other cry.
Keeping a friend for life isn't always easy. Maybe it's never easy, and not all friendships are meant to endure through the thick and thin of decades.
When I think of the friends who have remained with me through a long time, I think of all the moments when our friendships might have ruptured.
The misunderstandings, the resentments, the rivalries, the differences in life choices, the miles, the day-to-day churn of doing everything that needs to get done. Living can drive people apart.
I'm not sure I could have correctly predicted in my teens and 20s who among my friends would be the ones I'd still hold close all these years later, but when I think of the ones who have lasted, it comes down to a few qualities.
Respect for each other. Some spiritual kinship. Humility. Effort. These are the glues that hold friends together.
Who are you willing to make an effort for? Who makes an effort for you? Who are the people with whom you are willing to show your frailty, mental or physical, whose frailties you can accept without judgment or fear?
If I were going to write that novel, I'd also reflect on the different things I've learned and received from my old friends.
They've reinforced my understanding of generosity. Of the value of showing up when it matters, of making time when you think you don't have it. The values of listening, of forgiving, of asking to be forgiven.
In New York, I hung out in the hospital for a few days. On my last day, before I headed back to Chicago, my old friend leaned over and put her hand on mine. She had been released from the tubes and we were sitting in a sunny hospital lounge. She would be headed home, too, in a couple of days, where she could sleep in her own bed, watch the leaves change on her familiar trees, get ready for chemo.
"You know," she said, in a version of the phrase with which she had greeted me, "if you want to write something about this, you have my permission."
If I were to write that novel, I'd write about how she has helped me understand the courage, the humility and the generosity of saying, "Could you come?"
It's a request that between old friends is the best kind of gift.