THE OTHER BREAK-UP

For one woman, it was a 20-year friendship terminated in her 50s that brought a new and unexpected heartbreak.

Esther Caine reflects on the heartbreak that accompanied the end of a 20-year friendship

Icried for three days and stayed in bed for a week. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat.

My broken heart didn’t feel metaphorical – I had an actual ache in the middle of my torso, perhaps not precisely where my heart is, but close enough to imagine that some tender organ inside me, one that kept me alive and functioning, was badly damaged.

When I did finally go out into the world again, I looked at other people going about their business as usual, laughing and chatting, carefree and content, and wondered how they could simply continue with their lives while mine had fractured. It was unthinkable to me that they couldn’t sense my pain, that it wasn’t radiating out of me like an oil spill, tainting all it touched.

This wasn’t the astonishing agony of a shattered first love. I’d been through that and come out the other side, much thinner than when I’d gone in, but also having learnt that having your heart broken doesn’t actually kill you, even if it feels for a while like it will. It also wasn’t the drawn-out throb of a bitter divorce. I’d done that, too, and emerged intact, if sadder and more cynical. And my first post-marriage love affair, a messy exercise in inappropriateness, had ended in regret and humiliation, but I’d moved on from that, too, a wiser and (I hope) more discerning person.

By my 50s, I’d assumed I’d traversed most of the losses and pains that adult relationships bring. But this was a new bereavement, a first.

Looking back, it’s obvious now that the fracture lines were there practically from the start. We were very different people, thrown together mainly by the similarity of our circumstances: each a single mother to two children of similar ages, struggling to survive financially, and often lonely. In those early years, the parallels in our lives outweighed the perpendiculars.

The one area neither of us ever

trod was parenting – we mutually tacitly acknowledged the unspoken rule that criticising child-rearing techniques was one hundred percent off limits.

There were always personality clashes, even if we never addressed them. I considered her sloppy; she thought me pedantic. I found it hard to come to terms with her casually selfish attitude to life; she constantly commented on how I was an exasperating stickler for societal rules. I hated her elastic moral stances, which changed according to the situation; she found me annoyingly unbending. She was argumentative; I was a know-it-all. Squalls around all these issues blew up and blew over – on some level, I think, we both valued our friendship too much to allow the little things to scuttle it.

The one area neither of us ever trod was parenting – we mutually tacitly acknowledged the unspoken rule that criticising child-rearing techniques was one hundred percent off limits. This didn’t stop us each having our own opinions, of course. Her children were, I thought, perfect examples of everything that was wrong with millennials – unfocused, entitled, resentful – and they were that way because she’d always given in to them. And she eventually let slip that my daughter had complained to her constantly over the years about how hard-hearted and unempathetic I was – with which she agreed.

The trigger was cocked when she wanted her youngest daughter’s new boyfriend to be included on my daughter’s very small, very private wedding invitation list. My daughter and I had agonised for days over the list, regretfully excising people whom we’d loved to have had there. In many cases we emailed or phoned them to explain our limits of budget (I was carrying the lion’s share of the cost of the wedding) and space (it would be held in my back garden), and all responded with understanding. So

I was very reluctant to give up one precious slot to a random boy we’d never met.

Circumstances and attitude then conspired to pull the trigger. She phoned me one day when I was on my way to the hospital, where I’d been spending all my spare time helping another very close friend through the long downward spiral to death from cancer. She wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer, she said, when it came to the new boyfriend’s attendance at the wedding. ‘If it’s money, I’ll pay for his meal. If it’s space, we’ll bring an extra table and chair.’

Her grasp of the bigger picture was so absent, her need to fulfil her own – and her daughter’s – needs so allpervasive, her suggestions so ridiculous, that I told her that the answer was simply no and I didn’t want to discuss it. ‘And,’ I said, knowing how glibly she could ignore my wishes, as she had done it to me before several times, ‘please don’t just turn up with him on the day.’

When I think back on it now, I suppose I had much higher expectations of this friendship, which both she and I had, by that stage, nurtured over 20odd years. We’d had our disagreements, of course, but mainly we’d been able to love and support each other through the vagaries of life – not only the many ups and downs of single motherhood throughout our kids’ childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, but also (among other things) the death of a parent and a drinking problem (mine), and an abusive romantic relationship and some serious mental issues (hers).

But this total disagreement about the wedding invitation list was, it seemed, unresolvable: I felt I’d already had way more than I could comfortably handle on my emotional plate, and no space for dealing with yet another of my friend’s (to my mind) selfish requests; to her, I was just being a stickler for the rules.

My other friend died, and it devastated me. Two weeks later the wedding took place. The new boyfriend didn’t come to that evening function – but, in what I couldn’t help but see as a show of hubris on the part of my friend, he did turn up, invited by her but not by me, to the post-event breakfast the next morning.

Over the next few weeks I tried, in that resentful-humiliated way of jilted significant others, both to make up with her and to make her see my side of things. I wanted her to understand the unreasonableness of her demand and admit to her appalling timing: what I’d needed from her was understanding of my strictures of space and finances, and support while my other friend was dying; what she’d given me instead was a ridiculous fight centred on a boy she barely knew and I didn’t know at all.

Her response, in a lengthy and cutting WhatsApp message, was that I needed to look at my ‘stuff’, and if I wanted to talk, I was to allow her to direct the discussions – she would be able to ‘find common ground’, something that I, according to her, was incapable of doing. But, of course, her ‘common ground’ wasn’t that uneasy no-man’s land that leaves both parties somewhat placated, somewhat peeved. Her message made it clear: in her anger with me for having thwarted her

desires, she required the schism to be my fault entirely.

The difference between a romantic break-up and the collapse of a significant friendship is this: when your lover ruins your life, people commiserate. They understand when you can’t make it into the shower for a week, and they bring you flowers and make you meals that you don’t eat, and allow you to get drunk and cry and throw up on their carpet, and listen while you drivel on endlessly about the other person, and agree that they’re a sh*t and that you deserve better. When a special friend lets you down so hard that you’re left bereft, you’re on your own – despite all the symptoms of genuine heartbreak, you’re expected to just get on with it. Whoever heard of someone taking to their bed over the break-up of a friendship?

I was able to do so under the guise of a physical ailment – I had a flare-up of an agonising lower-back issue that crippled me for weeks. During the time I was high on painkillers and confined to bed, I did what the heartbroken do: I dissected each element and aspect of our friendship, looking for the reasons, examining cause and effect, veering wildly between self-recrimination and blame. Why hadn’t I just let her bring the damned boyfriend? Aunt Mabel, who would have had to be chopped off the invitation list to make space, would have just had to understand! But how could my friend be so selfish; after all the years of our friendship, how could she let something so minor destroy what we had? Maybe I shouldn’t have let the terrible pain caused by my dying friend bleed over into this other friendship. But then why hadn’t my friend understood what I was going through, what an incredibly tough time I was having?

The worst thing was that, as in romantic break-ups, the person in whose sympathy I wanted to wallow, on whose shoulder I wanted to cry, was the very person who’d caused all this agony. It was an unbearable vicious cycle, and at the time – for weeks, months even – it felt infinite. But, of course, it wasn’t. Like all things in life, good and bad, it finally came to an end.

Over time, the intense pain began lifting. One morning I woke up and realised that I wasn’t feeling as if a buffalo were sitting on my chest. I even saw a little sunlight streaming in the window, pushing aside the grey that had presided for so long.

I got up and got on with my life, stutteringly at first but, gradually, with decreasing sorrow.

I still sometimes think of my lost friendship and I am almost overcome with longing and misery. It’s an excess of emotion suffered silently, because grieving a broken friendship simply isn’t afforded the same public compassion as mourning a romance gone wrong, and it would seem frankly weird if I just let all these feelings hang out. So I endure it without external support, keeping my pain hidden and waiting for it to pass.

But I still miss my friend all the time – because there’s another difference between the break-up of a relationship and the collapse of a precious friendship. ‘The way to get over one is to get under another’ is the somewhat tasteless adage for moving on from a failed romance. But when it comes to the death of a significant friendship – a bond built and nurtured through joy and tears, often over many years – there’s simply no replacement. It’s a hole in your universe, one in the shape of that specific friend, and it can never be filled.

I still sometimes think of my lost friendship and I am almost overcome with longing and misery.