My life changes when the relationships I have formed as we grow begin to disappear when friends die. In a sense, my friends have defined my life, for better or worse.  They share my common ground. But many of my friends are gone.

Friendships have always been challenging for me. As a child, I had no friends; as a journalist, I moved 14 times before the age of 35. I had lots of anger and anxiety to deal with.  I have often made people uneasy.

I loved being a reporter for many reasons, one of which was that it was almost impossible to make friends.

For many people, friendships determine the quality of life.

I can’t say that is true for me. I made few close friends, kept only one or two, and had only one left. One of my friends, a neighbor, dropped dead a week or so ago. He was younger than me, healthier than me, far more athletic than me, and had many more friends than me.

At last count, my only remaining close friend lives 400 miles away, and I haven’t seen him in years. We do exchange e-mails once in a while.

I’m not sure what the meaning of all that is, but when my neighbor friend died so suddenly and unexpectedly (is death ever really expected?), death and its meaning crept closer to me.

The death of my friends is a crossover time for me.  What do I do? Seek a new friend?  Withdraw into my life as I tend to, risk the difficulties and rejection in making new friends? Do I need another friend, and if so, what far? Can a cat or dog be a friend?

At this age, my needs are different. I’m looking for something other than a lunch partner making small talk in a coffee shop. I don’t watch football or any sport, jog, kayak, play golf, talk politics, or argue about it.

As the people I knew who shared common ground with me die or turn inward, I am challenged to find new common ground, most often with people of different ages. The choice is up to me; I can vanish inside myself or turn outward for new excitement and challenge.

My choice was clear. I got involved with helping refugee children, taught at the Mansion, an assisted care facility, and helped the residents in need. I seek out interesting people doing exciting things and photograph, talk to, and learn about them. In turn, they speak to me and come to understand me.

I’ve gotten deeply involved in supporting our local food pantry, which has introduced me to many people, young and old, who share a commitment to this work and a common ground. It keeps me busy.

These are not people I have dinner with or hang out with on weekends. This is a way of carving out new kinds of friends. It keeps me alert and engaged and pulls me out of myself and into the lives of others. I take portraits of exciting and creative people I like. That has meant a lot to me, and all of this keeps me from being isolated or static.

One danger of aging is narcissism; I can easily spend all my energy taking my temperature, crowing about the cost of medicine, and obsessing over my health. I see that happening all the time to people of different ages. I am determined that it will not happen to me. I find it difficult to talk to people my age; the conversation almost always focuses on health and medicine.

People come up to me on the street with a sorrowful face and ask with great drama, “How are you, Jon?” as if my death is imminent and my health must be disintegrating.

I  want to say, “My health is not who I am; it is not my life. Ask me about my life, not my health! Ask about my work or my blog. Ask about my farm or wife and my pictures; they are interesting things.”  They assume that is all I want to talk about. More and more, I find myself saying that.

I understand these are life-changing questions and that life changes as I work into my late 70s. What I want and need are very different.

I don’t need material things now, but I crave understanding.

I can only name one or two people who understand me; one is my wife. The simple truth is I’m looking for something other than new friends. Oddly enough, I don’t have time for them in the old way of friendship.

Surprisingly, I have made some good friends online, including the good people in my Zoom Meeting. In our time, good friends never have to see each other. There is some appeal to that.

What do I do when friends die?

One path is the temptation to live in a world of the past, a world long gone, based on memories that cling like seawood.

Yet another is to retreat within a cocoon of old books, photographs, and distant memories of days that always seem better than the ones we live in. I know better.

Yet another is to wallow in old talk and complaints about doctors, health care, and the cost of medicines. I don’t do old talk; it kills more people than disease.

I remember when the idea of older adults falling in love was a joke. I remember people jeering at men with younger wives or older men who talk about having sex.

Unlike any other phase of life, older people like myself are asked to deal with the challenge of different types of relationships. Our world is changing a lot faster than most of us are or can. Teenagers live in a new and different world.

There is the very haunting presence of friends that I’ve lost to death or illness. That is most of them.

The dying of friends takes a part of me into the grave with each one of them. The death of spouses, family members, and loved ones takes even more away – community, memories, and personal connections.

The number of people who know me or know much about me is shrinking rapidly, and the number of people who want to hear about the lives of an older man is shrinking even more.

At my age, people over 60 are invisible to almost everyone younger. I think we depress them.

If I sound depressing, I’m not generally depressed. I am sometimes depressed, but life is not depressing for me.

I decided to grow older differently than my parents and most of my friends. Late in life, I moved away from the familiar to the country.  Everyone I knew told me it was a crazy thing to do. They were right. But it turned out it was the best thing for me to do.

It gave me a different way to grow older. I had no choice but to change.

Just as I was giving up on love in my late 60s, it turned out to be just down the road for me, and  I fell hell over heels and remained that way.

Love changed my life and blew it up like helium into a balloon. I never imagined having sex into my late 70’s. I am still too embarrassed to talk about it.

When someone dies, I know another road has been closed for me. Retirement communities are not for me, nor is retirement to some condo in Florida or retirement at all. Thank God, I can’t afford it.

I am healthy, balking, alert, write daily, and almost functional (yes, I know, the typos).

Making friends now requires a lot of energy and time, and I don’t spend much time in restaurants, social gatherings,  bars, or watching the NFL. In 14 years, only two or three people have invited me to dinner. Without children in the house, making friends is more complex.

I’ve just never fit into a circle.

I needed to make my life enjoyable for others and me. I am a writer and photographer,  and while I write a lot about myself, I also love writing about the people I meet, photograph, and talk to.

It takes work to make friends here. There are ways, but not in the old or conventional way.

I tossed out the script for going old in America: save a ton of money, pay off the mortgage, find a good retirement community, keep working, learn new things,  get walking shoes, exercise, and meet new people.

In one way, being alone became easier as I got older.

But a blessing of these years is that they offer me the chance to be excited by the new things I am doing and the new people I meet. They don’t need to invite me to dinner to be my friend.

I don’t have any friends I always see or talk to daily, but I have many more friends than ever. Go figure.

This doesn’t demand that I fall in love, though that helps. It does require that I love someone else enough to be just as interested in them as I am in myself.

That’s the hard part but also the best part.

One essayist described life as “Old Age is an island surrounded by death.” People who see it that way have no great incentive to live; they wait for death to come.

Old Age is an island surrounded by life, rich, intense, and exciting. It is what I wish it to be.

Aging is fascianting. In one sense, it shrinks life and its opportunities. In another, it enlarges life beyond my expectations or experiences.

I will miss my friend who died, but I won’t mourn him much.

There are too many things in my life to love to spend a lot of time missing someone who is gone. He wouldn’t want it any other way.