Elissa ElyOne of the sorrows of age is growing old enough to have lost touch with others. One of the pleasures is being young enough to find them again. During the pandemic, when we all individualized our forms of escape, I began writing letters to lost colleagues from the many stages of life, as far back as junior high school, as recently as a job in a clinic treating patients with psychosis. Addresses were supplied by the ever-helpful Google, which can never keep a secret to itself.
Most of the addressees never answered. But one from childhood did, and when we realized we were isolated in adjacent states, we decided to meet halfway—in a deli off I-84. It would be a friendship rediscovered over corned beef sandwiches and masked except when chewing.
There was much to be reviewed, knowing that the most imperative years could never be fully described. Our separate pasts were too separate. Because it was easier not to start with facts, we started with the books we were reading. If reading is a road into the person, we have taken different routes: hers into history, mine into fiction. It made for a pleasant and neutral beginning.
We moved on to the facts and did what we could with them: marriages, children, travel. Then we moved on again, a little gingerly, to the feelings of celebration, loss, and the search for meaning in the later stages of life.
Sandwiches were eaten (mine was good; I recommend the rye and coarse mustard), and a piece of cake was modestly split down the middle (I could have managed the entirety). Mugs were refilled. When the bill came, it was warmly argued over, then split just like the cake.
Side by side, we left the deli. Under any circumstances, these last moments of a visit can be awkward — time is up, but contact isn’t over. Here was a reunion after so many decades. How to say goodbye?
In the clinic, one appointment could be counted on to follow another, which made saying goodbye easy. “To be continued,” I would murmur to the patient, opening the door. Both sides were confident that a next meeting was ahead. It was a reliable constancy. This was different.
Outside the deli, we realized we were heading to different parking lots.
“Well,” I said to my old friend, a little uncertainly, “to be continued.”
“Arrivederci,” she said. We waved, kissed the air, and put our masks back on.
But there are no guarantees. I had stepped briefly into her world, she into mine, before each of us headed to our separate lot. We might meet again, we might not. Life interferes, and when it does, it never asks permission for the conditions it imposes.
There may be sickness ahead, dire endings, and no next corned beef on rye with coarse mustard. A great deal of life is already behind now, and what remains ahead is unclear. Sometimes the present has to be enough.
Elissa Ely writes about seniors/baby boomers for The Belmont Voice. She is a community psychiatrist.
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