The surprising joy of making new old friends
At this stage of life, I assumed my circle of lifelong friends was fixed. Then my high school classmates proved me wrong.
Robert Kuttner is cofounder and coeditor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is “Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America.”
As we enter the last years of active life, among the accumulating losses is the loss of old friends. There are only so many of them. When they are gone, they are irreplaceable. You can travel to new places and take up new hobbies, but you can’t make new lifelong friends.
Except, it turns out that sometimes you can.
This may sound corny, but stay with me. I’ve been developing deepening friendships with people who I knew casually, or didn’t much like, or didn’t know at all, when we were in high school together more than 60 years ago.
We began having reunions 20 years after graduation, every five years. We got pretty good turnouts. I attended most. After our 2022 reunion, as deaths began accumulating, something remarkable and elevating happened. Two of our classmates — my friend Peter, whom I first met in kindergarten, and Joyce, whom I knew in high school but not well — suggested that we hold regular Zoom conversations about concerns that we all wrestle with as we age. The topics were stunning. They included:
▪Holding on to joy as we face our own mortality.
▪What are your regrets?
▪Where to live as we get older.
▪Are you happier today than you were as a senior in high school?
▪Legacies: What will we leave behind?
▪Losses: Coping with the loss of friends and loved ones.
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▪Risks I’ve taken, good and not so good, and risks I might take now.
And several more. But you get the idea.
Over the course of these three years, having these conversations with about 30 former classmates and maybe 20 on any given Zoom session, we stumbled onto something magical. You can’t talk about these topics without becoming much better friends.
Maybe it is the fact that we are all the same age, that we all went to the same high school, and that we meet only once a month for two hours that has led to a comfortable blend of intimacy and safety. People have been surprisingly candid and trusting, without breaching personal boundaries or bleeding emotionally. It does not feel like therapy, though these conversations are certainly therapeutic, even profound. What it feels like is deep friendship — new old friendship.
These Zoom meetings continue. We don’t run out of topics, or questions, or shared insights. Poetry is often part of our process. We will continue these as long as we live.
I had stayed close to only two old friends from high school. And even with them, we seldom ventured into some of this personal territory. Of the others on Zoom, I knew maybe five or six casually, and at least 10 not at all. I had completely wrong impressions of several others. Or maybe they turned into much more interesting people in the course of becoming adults and leading rich lives.
The things we do not talk about are as important as what we do discuss. We don’t talk about the stuff that often passes for conversation among people in their seventies and eighties. No organ recitals, no talk about real estate, no recounting of recent trips or kids’ achievements, no digs at former spouses, no discussion of books read or restaurants discovered. No current events. We came to realize that these shallow and safe conversation topics, all too typical among casual friends, have a way of crowding out what really matters.
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We occasionally get into tricky but rewarding terrain. My high school girlfriend, whom I will call Sarah, was a very intense first love for both of us. She was a superstar in high school. But Sarah struggled with depression and ended up taking her life in her early thirties. We had split up after graduation, and when she started to fall apart early in her freshman year at college, I carried around some guilt. I have long since put that aside, but I never had much chance to process the whole story with classmates who also knew her.
One of our group suggested a session to reminisce about Sarah. After some discussion, we amended the idea in two respects. First, we would limit the discussion to memories of the girl we knew and admired in high school and not the gruesome details of her decline and death. And we would not spend the entire session on Sarah but add other classmates who had died much too young and under tragic circumstances. It turned out to be a powerful and cathartic conversation.
Last May, we attended our most recent reunion, which went for almost two full days. It was far richer than previous ones, filled with genuine old friends, and lots more to talk about. I was sad when it ended, but I am looking forward to more Zoom conversations as well as some live visits.
It’s still the case that lifelong friends, who have been with you at every stage of the journey, are irreplaceable. But it’s surprising and wonderful to appreciate that new and deepening old friendships are possible.
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