A quest for friendship

Finding new friends is a challenge for older people – after children have grown, marriages have ended, and jobs and homes are downsized. 

In Meeting New People by Daniel M. Lavery, Barbara hosts her best friend for dinner and is surprised when Susan refuses to sit. Instead, she pulls out a list, insisting the relationship must end. Barbara offers various assumptions, corrections and counterpoints, but Susan is adamant. “I just know what being supported feels like. And you weren’t supporting me.” 

Troubled and embarrassed, Barbara ponders the elusive qualities of close friendship, reflecting on eight other best friends from her past who also moved on. In her late 50s, Barbara does not fear old age, and instead worries about loneliness after a lifetime of anticipation about growing older with other people. From there, she launches into one of the novel’s saddest observations:  “a lot of other people, not just a husband but a whole crowd of people – and I used to know quite a lot of people, the world felt so full of people I knew and liked, and people I felt myself just on the verge of getting to know, and I thought life was always going to drop new friends into my lap to accompany the old ones, but instead what’s happened is the old ones drop off and the new ones do, too, and I don’t think I’ve managed to develop the kind of good strong character that keeps people close to you… the kind that makes approaching old age feel like a reward and a comfort.” 

Barbara’s life did not follow an easy path. Divorced twice, she lost a professional job and turned to the food industry, working for much lower wages. Her mother and sister had early deaths. She is exacting, argumentative, and even when she does hold her tongue, acquaintances can’t help but sense Barbara’s judgment and disapproval. Readers naturally find her difficult, and even the character herself notes at one point, “Not liking things has never been a problem for me.” She likewise struggles to converse with her adult son, an only child, and his family and is pained by beautiful memories from their earliest days together: “One of the things that’s difficult about relating toa grown child is that only one of remembers the honeymoon period,” the “perfect moments of speechless mutual adoration… moments where he wanted nothing more and neither did I.”  

Set in her ways, she regularly details best practices around cooking, clothing and other ordinary rules for living. Many of these are common sense but other suggestions are downright rigid. Such tendencies lead her to increasingly second-guess her overtures to others and her responses. Barbara suspects a misunderstanding of multiple basic and unwritten rules may be a reason for her own personal failures to the point of self-torture: “But there’s got to be a way to stop thinking like this all of the time. I want my mind to be a quiet and well-ordered room.”

Unfortunately, much of the book’s tone is similar to an afternoon spent with a quarrelsome person, always ready with nonstop complaints and excessive details in any story she shares. At one point, Barbara describes a friend from high school chemistry class, and confesses, “This can’t possibly be interesting to you, since it’s not even interesting to me, and I was there for it.” Such sentences, with authors compelled to admit their characters are boring, foolish or fill-in-the-blank is often a red flag for readers. 

It's worthwhile to read this book through the end. Barbara knows what she wants in a friend and what potential friends expect in her. Early in the book, she scoffs about finding friends in a nursing home, adding “People like health and success and symmetry and well-being. They might tolerate aging or illness or bad luck once they get to know you, but it’s not what they’re looking for in someone new.”

She is candid about not wanting to volunteer., the age-old solution for seniors searching for friendship and something to do. “It’s just that important things and money go together in pretty much every other area of life, so I always suspect if there’s work being offered for free, it’s because the work doesn’t actually matter in the first place.” 

Readers can be sure they won't agree with many of Barbara’s choices. Still, she puts aside past dislikes and devotes full effort into the task of finding friendship. And the first step is revealed by the book’s title – meet new people and friendship may follow. 

Strangers

Health experts are adamant that maintaining strong social connections is key for healthy aging.

Loneliness and social isolation contribute to depression, anxiety, as well as increased risk of suicide, dementia, stroke and heart attacks, reports Mayo Clinic. 

The elderly are not the only ones feeling loneliness.

In Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang, a young man works for an online rent-a-companion service, well paid for standing in as dates, friends and even father to a little girl with a distracted, insecure single mother. The mother has paid Stranger for years to stand in as father to the intelligent and somewhat neglected girl, on the cusp of becoming a teenager. The time commitment is one day per week, and his storyline: He works as a long-haul trucker. 

That relationship is shocking but understandable as Stranger was the child of a single mother dedicated more toward her failed acting career than her role as mother. Stranger didn’t finish high school and has few skills except for good looks and an amiable personality flexible for most client scenarios. He excels at his work, hence the novel's title. He balances long-term connections with suitable cool distance, likely atoning for past transgressions and his mother’s suicide. Adept at providing people with the services they need, Stranger surely would have relished a stand-in father who would have helped with homework and offered guidance on everyday problems: “Wasn’t the staid performance of love and care everything anyone really wanted? Did deeper feeling have to exist for the act to have meaning?” 

Stranger also sees his line of work as another reflection of “the trashed decadence of an overfattened empire poised for its inevitable fall.” 

Friendship can turn on and off like a faucet, and Stranger mulls over the meaning of such relationships, wondering if it’s all an attempt to dodge loneliness: “In school, friendship was an incidental by-product of liking the same movies or being good at kicking a ball on a grassy field. Rarely did we take care of one another… but still stuck together because we didn’t want to be alone. But now, as adults, people chose friendship – this fickle arrangement that could be taken away at any time without recourse.” 

Problems ensue when Stranger mixes two clients, the young girl who trusts him as her father and a woman who’s struggling with writing assignments and relies on him for role playing. The threesome heads off to the zoo, and suddenly, “Somehow, we were more of a family with the addition of one female stranger than we had been without – a feminine power.” Darlene, the writer, actually pretending to be a paternal aunt, fascinates the little girl who wants more, and Stranger must handle a fake daughter corresponding with a fake aunt.  

The writer condemns the pretend-parenting as wrong, and threatens to expose the charade even as Stanger contemplates trying for a relationship with the girl’s mother in order to have a daughter. His narrative breaks down and the girl’s mother breaks off contact, accusing him of being a parasite. “You prey off people’s insecurities. You don’t let them change or grow. You want them to be weak, to depend on people like you.” 

Afterward, Stranger sets out to learn more about his own mother and confronts the purpose of his life, realizing he must decide if he wants to keep pretending at relationships or take a risk by proving his existence and pursuing the real thing, good or bad. 

Back to aging and isolation, Senior Navigator offers tips for staying socially connected. And sometimes companions can be rented, as one family did when an aunt suddenly became incapacitated and landed in a nursing home a few hundred miles away. The family heard that that nursing home staff pay more attention to patients with involved family members. So the family paid a woman and child to visit each Wednesday or Thursday, bringing milkshakes and standing in as family. Two nieces also visited regularly, at least every other weekend. 

Simple and regular companionship can be a treasure. The aunt was pleased with the visitors, whether friends or strangers.

'Til death... and beyond

Baumgartner by Paul Auster is about the final years an elderly philosophy professor and the poignant love story with his poet wife. S.T. Baumgartner reveres Anna, a woman for whom even the most ordinary words were “imbued with some mesmerizing, transcendent quality.” That quality emerged “not just in her voice but in her power to transform the most ordinary movements of the body into acts of sublime self-expression and grace, the eloquence of her fingers as she turned the pages of a book, for example….” 

Anna died a decade earlier, at age 58 after being struck by a rogue wave at Cape Cod. Baumgartner struggles with life alone, trying to form new relationships even while thoughts of Anna linger.

At one point he dreams of receiving a phone call: “Such is the power of the imagination, he tells himself. Or, quite simply, the power of dreams. In the same way that a person can be transformed by the imaginary events recounted in a work of fiction.”  He concedes that “he has never not been in contact with Anna since the day she drowned, and if he has now conjured up an alternative world in which she knows that he is thinking about her, can feel him thinking about her, can think about him thinking about her, who is to say there isn’t some truth to it?”

Baumgartner wonders if he has found religion, “Or what passes for religion in a man who has none and believes in nothing but the obligation to ask good questions about what it means to be alive, even if he knows he will never be able to answer them.” 

The couple did not have children and Baumgartner has no regrets, understanding that family members do not automatically connect. He reflects on his own family history and his father’s unhappiness about running a family dress shop, starting at age 22 when illness would have otherwise forced the grandfather to sell. The father bid farewell to his dreams of studying history or law and becoming an activist. He left night school and a library job to support his mother and four siblings whom he did not respect – “there was no right choice or wrong choice, only two right choices that both would have come out wrong in the end.” The decision to stay with the store was “an honorable one, even a noble one, but if you began to feel that your self-sacrifice has been wasted on a family of morons and mooching chiselers, your choice will inevitably turn into a source of resentment, and, as the years go on, inflict serious damage on your soil.” 

Anna's spirit lives on through her writing. Soon after Anna’s death, her husband compiles her finest poems and arranges publication of a collection. And he continues to read her other unpublished poems, essays and short stories. 

Years after that publication, a colleague of Anna and Baumgartner reaches out to introduce a doctoral student who wishes to research Anna’s work for her dissertation. Baumgartner anxiously rearranges his plans and remodels a place for the student to stay. He recalls Anna's last dash into the waves and worries about the young woman's long drive during the winter months.

But he remains quiet, supporting a spirited and determined student, still connecting with Anna during the last few years of his life.