Friends of the road, or friends of the heart:

Make them family

by Lionel Wijesiri

The trouble with modern families we were born into, is that they are too far away. In emergencies we rush across the country (or continents) to their side, and vice versa. But, our blood kin are often too remote to ease us from Tuesdays to Thursdays. For this we must rely on our families of friends.

These new families may consist of either friends of the road assigned by chance, or friends of the heart achieved by choice. Friends of the road are those we happen to go to school with, work with or live near.

They know where we went last weekend and whether we still have a cold. Just being around gives them a provisional importance in our lives, and to us, in theirs. If we were to move away, six months or two years will probably erase us from each other’s thoughts - unless we have become friends of the heart.

Friends of the heart

Who is a friend of the heart? A friend of the heart is, e.g. one who perceives me as a better version of myself. We listen to good music, this friend and I, and enjoy good silences, too. We phone each other and, maybe, at times bother others too. We don’t confuse politeness with generosity. At times we argue. We travel together and when cash and time are short, a trip across town for a little snack will do. Coming and going, we absorb each other’s histories.

Such friendships are sacred and can be even more so if they lead to the equivalent of clans.

As a member in six or seven tribes besides the one I was born into, I have been trying to figure out which earmarks are common to both kinds of families. Here are my conclusions:

• Good families have a chief or a hero or a founder.

It means someone around whom others bunch up, and whose achievements and example spur them to honour him. Some blood dynasties produce such figures regularly; others languish for as many as five generations between hotshots. All clans need such a figure now and then.

• Good families have a switch board operator.

It means someone who cannot help, but keep track of what all others are up to, who plays Houston Mission Control to everyone else’s Apollo. This role is assumed rather than assigned. Someone always volunteers for it. That person feels driven to keep scrapbooks and photograph albums so the clan can see proof of its own continuity.

• Good families are hospitable.

Knowing that hosts need guests as much as guests need hosts, they are generous with honorary memberships for friends. Such clans exude a vivid sense of surrounding rings of relatives, neighbours, teachers, students and godparents, any of whom might break or slide into the inner circle. Inside that circle a wholesome, silent emotional feudalism develops.

It means you can ask me to supervise your children for the two weeks you will be in hospital, and however inconvenient it might be for me, I will manage. It means I can phone you on a dreary, wretched Sunday afternoon, knowing you will tell me to come right over.

• Good families deal squarely with unexpected dangers.

Pity the tribe that doesn’t have and cherish at least one talkative eccentric. Lunacy, bankruptcy, suicide and other unthinkable fates sooner or later afflict the noblest of clans. Family life is a set of givens, and it takes courage to see certain ‘givens’ as blessings rather than as curses.

• Good families price their rituals.

They are vital, and weld a family together, evoke a past, imply a future and hint at continuity. A clan becomes more of a clan each time it gathers to observe a fixed ritual New Year, Christmas, birthdays and so on, grieve at a funeral, or when it devises a new rite of its own. But rituals emerge at moments that happen only once, around whose memory meanings cluster. You don’t choose those moments, they choose themselves.

• Good families need to find ways to connect with future generations.

What are we to do, if we lack children? Build houses? Plant trees? Write books? Perhaps. But even so, there still should be children on the side-lines, if not at the centre, of our lives. It is a sad impoverishment if we don’t regularly see and talk to and laugh with - and make much of - people who can expect to outlive us by several decades.

• Good families honour their elders.

The wider the age range, the stronger the tribe. Grandparents now are in much more abundant supply than they were when old age was rarer. If actual grandparents are not at hand, no family should have too hard a time finding substitute ones to whom to give unfeigned homage.

No friends?

One day in the lobby of a friend’s apartment building I watched as two nurses came out of the elevator, one on either side of a wizened, staring woman who couldn’t have weighed more than 70 pounds. It was all the woman could do to make her way down three steps to the sidewalk and the curb, where a car waited to take her to a nursing home.

The woman, who was 90, had fallen that morning and hurt herself, the security officer told us. She had lived in the building for 40 years.

Her relatives were all dead, and her few surviving friends no longer chose to see her.

“But how can that be? “I asked my friend,“We could never be that alone, Could we?”

“It happens,” said my friend.

Maybe, we can stop it from happening, by giving more thought to our families and our clans and our several kinds of families.

No aim seems to me, more urgent nor any achievement more worthy than that.