TW and I had been friends for 35 or so years, and that ended a couple years ago. I got a text from a mutual friend a couple days ago that he has an aggressive form of cancer and isn’t expected to live past a few months.
I don’t really care. He became dead to me when our friendship ended, and I have no desire to visit him and wish him well. Truth is, I’ve been cursing him every day since we called it quits. I remember more bad things about him than good things, and I don’t want to mumble false platitudes in front of him or his loved ones, especially his soon-to-be-widow, whom I never could stand, but acted civil towards for the sake of our friendship.
I also made it a point not to complain about him in front of our mutual friends or bad-mouth him. I may be bitter, but I wasn’t going to burden our friends with my complaints. Not that I had a chance to anyway. Hardly any of them kept in touch with me after the blowup, and also, there was this pandemic.
Well, he isn’t dying, but there is one guy like this. I used to like him, and worked with him at our mutual hobby for many years. Then he apparently went insane, and decided to spend a year screwing me around. Now I have no desire to ever be in the same room with him again. I just learned he’s in town next month for a seminar, our first big one in person since the pandemic started, and I have no intention of attending.
No, all of my friends and acquaintances who have died have done so suddenly and without warning(or at least I didn’t hear about their illness till after they passed). Some of them I was not on good terms with, or hadn’t spoken to in years.
I always hold a regret that I never had a chance to have a last conversation with them, or to make up over what really is, in the grand scheme of things, a silly fight or misunderstanding.
If you don’t think that you will regret never having a chance to say a final goodbye to someone who was an important part of your life for so long, then you are a more stoic man than I.
Over a lifetime, sometimes you fall out with people, and sometimes those people die. The terminal illness doesn’t solve the dispute. If you feel nothing, you feel nothing. You’re the only one who knows what you feel.
Maybe it’s worth saying the the bare minimum just to prevent any later regrets. Personally I might consider doing that. You’re going to live and he’s going to die, so you can’t really lose the argument, whatever it is.
I’m more-or-less this way. I don’t personally hold grudges or write people off (that I can think of), but there’s people I just don’t care about except in the most abstract way. If you don’t feel something for that person dying, you just don’t. I don’t think it’s useful to (and I’m not saying the OP is doing this) wonder why, or challenge those feelings, or even feel bad about it. If that’s how you feel, that’s how you feel. Not everyone’s death or health status need have emotional impact on you.
I have, with my ex wife. When she passed - it will be ten years in August - I did not feel anything or shed a tear. All because of the way she reacted the last time I saw her alive 2.5 years before in the hospital. I left saying “sorry to bother you” and knowing I probably would never see her again.
I don’t want to reproduce the big long list of grievances I had for him here. I presented him with such a list, and he made no effort to address those grievances and threw the blame back at me, like he always did. I told him our friendship was on the line if he didn’t change, and he just blew me off. Fuck him.
To be honest, even people I really like and just haven’t spoken to in years, I often have a more abstract reaction of “that’s really sad/I’m surprised” than any deep, personal sorrow. More of a respectful “I wish that didn’t happen to them” than anything else. There’s only maybe a dozen people I’d cry or feel deep sadness for if they passed away. So not feeling anything for someone you seem to actively dislike – that’s normal.
I had a friend I had to let go. Towards the end, mental illness had taken hold, but somehow, everything the friendship was about had to go into “taking care of her”. I had two sick parents on my hands. I couldn’t voluntarily care for a third person.
You can only take so many phone calls threatening suicide, and go running over to sit and listen to her ruminate about all her problems and how impossible her life is, and hear her plan her funeral. I called mental health, I called the cops, I drove her mom and myself to visit her in the mental health facility. Nothing helped.
I stopped taking the calls. I had moved a couple of times, so I guess she gave up looking for me.
Either that or she went through with the suicide. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.
Other than my wife, kids and grandkids, I don’t think I’d feel any deep sorrow if anyone I know died. (and I really don’t understand people who got sad when someone like Prince died, for example). It’s more “that’s a shame” kind of feeling. Maybe I’m dead inside.
I was actually thinking the Princess Di thing. I like to think of myself as a deeply empathetic person, I cry at movies at the drop of a hat as I embody the characters, but some things remain at a distance for me. I don’t think that makes us dead inside — we just react differently. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism; perhaps it’s simple acceptance of that’s how life is. We all die, and if we got deeply emotional at every death in our life, we’d be wrecks.
I understand it. When I’ve cut someone out my life like that it wasn’t for nothing. If I heard of the death of someone like that it would just remind me of the reason for the rift, so I’d rather not even know, I certainly wouldn’t want to dwell on it.
I had an old friend send me a Christmas card last December, trying to get back in touch, but I decided I wasn’t going to do it. I know through mutual friends that she had major heart surgery last year and that she now needs a kidney transplant, so I suspect that’s why she sent the card - she doesn’t know how much time she has left.
She’d always been religious, but moved from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity about 20-ish years ago and kept trying to bring me into the fold. This was very awkward for me and the friendship expired. I doubt I’ll see her or talk to her again and I’m OK with that. She has her husband, her religious friends and her God.