The Photo That Came Through Tonight

The chat is called the girls and it has been muted since March, which means she does not get the notifications, and it also means that every so often she opens it herself and reads three weeks in one go, which is worse.

Tonight there is a photograph. Eleven of them in Fiona's kitchen, taken by somebody standing on a chair, everybody looking up, somebody's arm blurred at the edge. It is somebody's fortieth. Alice's, probably. Erin has her head thrown back laughing at something and Kath is pointing at the camera.

Jo looks at it for a long time.

Here is the thing she cannot say to anybody, and the reason she cannot say it is that it makes her sound bitter and she is not bitter. Nobody in that photograph did anything wrong. Nobody excluded her. She was, technically, invited to the thing before this one and the one before that. She said no both times, for reasons that were completely true, and then people stopped asking, which is exactly what happens and is nobody's fault.

And every one of those eleven women was a real friend. That is what makes it so hard to talk about. She is not grieving a group of people who used her. She is grieving people she loved, whose company she cannot be in, because the room those friendships lived in is a room she cannot go into anymore.

She puts the phone face down. Then she picks it up and looks at the photograph again.

You know that photograph. It might be a group chat, a Facebook memory, a car going past with people in it you know. Nobody wronged you. There is nothing to be angry about, and the absence of anything to be angry about leaves you holding a loss with no shape.

You are grieving something real, and you were never wrong to miss it. The Proverb says a man that hath friends must shew himself friendly, and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, which honors friendship as a genuine good before it names a better one; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes both halves of that true in a room with a phone face down on the arm of a chair.

A friend that sticketh closer

Let me name what makes this one so difficult, because it is not the same as being hurt by somebody.

Grief needs a shape. When somebody wrongs you, the grief has somewhere to go: you can be angry, and anger is at least a direction. When nobody has done anything at all, the loss has nowhere to point, so it comes back and points at you, and the sentence it arrives with is that you are the thing that changed and therefore you are the thing that is wrong. That is what a photograph of eleven laughing women does at ten o'clock at night, and it is not truthful, and it is very hard to argue with.

Here is the verse, and I want both halves of it.

A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.Proverbs 18:24

The first half takes friendship seriously as work and as a good thing. Scripture does not treat human friendship as a lesser consolation to be replaced by something spiritual. It calls it a real thing that must be tended, which means what you lost was a real thing and losing it is a real loss.

You are holding an honest grief, and you were never being oversensitive about something that did not matter. That is what stands written in Proverbs 18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman call a loss a loss without needing anybody in it to have behaved badly.

And then the second half, and notice it does not cancel the first. There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Sticketh: adheres, holds on, does not detach. The picture is not of somebody who is fond of you. It is of somebody bonded to you, and closer than the closest relation there is in that culture.

You have a friend who is adhered to you rather than merely fond of you, and you were never left holding this evening with nobody in the room. Scripture says sticketh closer than a brother, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a presence and not a consolation prize at ten o'clock at night.

Now, one thing carefully, because it matters and it is easy to get wrong. Those eleven women are not villains and you do not have to make them into any in order to be sad. There is a version of this that says they were never really your friends, and that version is a lie that would let you off the grief by rewriting the past, and the price of it is that you lose the real memories too. Keep them. They were real. That is why it hurts.

You are allowed to hold both the loss and the love, and you were never required to prosecute anybody to be allowed to be sad. The written word calls friendship a thing to be shown and tended, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person grieve without making anyone the enemy.

And here is the practical end of it, said plainly the way this site always says it. The table is not going to refill by itself and the answer is not to wait to feel like it. One message, tonight, to one person you still have. Not the eleven. One. And the friend who knows, the counselor, the group that meets on a weeknight where people are honest about exactly this, all of it is God's kindness with a face on it, and reaching for it is one of the real ways new friendships have ever started.