Cherry blossoms are sacred to the Japanese, who call them sakura. Pink, white, yellow and sometimes green, the flowers symbolize a natural world that is pure divinity; and in their fleeting softness, the way of all living things. Like the sakura that bloom for no more than two weeks every spring, life is briefly beautiful.
They’ve long since come and gone this year. They need cool winters to flower in March and April so they’re not a common sight in Texas. If they come to mind now, in the baking heat of a Central Plains summer, it’s because someone I knew, someone who used to be a friend, passed away less than a month before the first sakura bloomed in his adopted city of Tokyo.
Had he lived, he might have told people on Facebook about going on a hanami or cherry blossom viewing. I wouldn’t have seen that post though, or any other. Four years earlier, I’d severed every connection that had kept us tied together.
Our last contact had been by phone in 2018. I wasn’t in good place then and neither was he so I stepped away for a while. Then that while, which felt like the greatest relief, solidified into permanence. Meanness had become his habit as helplessness had become mine and the friendship had become this badly broken thing neither of us knew how to fix. He and I had known each other so long we couldn’t imagine our lives without each other. Unless I let go we’d continue to circle the drain like the bitter wedlocked couple we weren’t.
Things got better for me after that but slowly. Hand over hand, I pulled myself up and out of the hard place that nearly consumed me. But my former friend continued the slip-slide down. Two years after I cut the cord, a mutual acquaintance asked if I could put money into a fund she’d created to help him pay for cardiac surgery. He was a different man now, with a new heart powered by a pacemaker. I donated, glad to help. But the other thing she tacitly asked for—that I talk to him again—I could not do. He stopped trying to get me back into his life afterward.
I only learned about his death on social media. The mutual friend who’d advocated for his heart fund had not told me; at the time he died, she was too stunned to say anything to anyone beyond immediate friends and family. But thoughts of his passing stayed with me for days that turned into weeks then months. There was grief there, for an aborted friendship I believed I’d take with me to the end. But there was something else there, too, another sadness I’d not known before. In my youth I had not understand death or its finality; only that dying was something people— mostly the old—occasionally did. His death was different. With no ifs, ands or buts, his end swept away an invisible generational shield. Others would follow him because now death was not a matter of if but when.
He did not leave this world as my friend; but he is still the first among my contemporaries to pass into history. Which is significant not just because I will miss him, no matter the differences we had. But because he was there to witness moments with me that in their singularity, would not repeat again. Like turning twenty-one. Like leaving my college life for the great unknown. Like seeing the heart I’d held back from love shatter into more pieces than I could count. Then time passed and he himself became another kind of first: the one person to remain in my orbit for longer than a few months or years.
This man, this former friend, was a Berkeley drop-out who still ghosted campus the year I met him. His acquaintances were people I lived with at the student co-op. Stubbornly persistent, he called me, made me laugh and wheedled me for greater closeness so many times that the wheedling itself became a joke. Give it up, man, you’re crazy. It wasn’t funny though, at least not to him. I listened to him in a way few did, including the ex-Air Force father who bullied and beat him and the mother who let it happen because that’s what fathers did to sons. So he held on to the hope. And when, many years later, he came into his parents’ money—not much but a good sum—he offered what I, a broke adjunct professor, could never repay: a two-week trip east to enjoy the pleasures of a Manhattan Christmas.
He scoffed at my protests for almost a year before I finally consented to go with him, not thinking for a moment that our vacation was anything more than just a friendly excursion. Until he proved me wrong. Two nights before we left New York, he told me the strange truth: that he had intended the visit to be “the world’s longest date.” I said no again to a relationship; looking at me like an angry child, he demanded to know why. I explained what I thought he already knew. He was my friend for life, nothing more, nothing less. Though outwardly conciliatory, inwardly I fumed at his deception. The last time we had ever talked about his wish for a relationship had been more than twenty years before.
Nothing was the same after that. He became more irascible than ever. There was more I did that displeased than pleased and felt eggshells under my feet though I said nothing. Then my life went into upheaval and I turned to him. No matter what, he was still my friend…until the passive-aggressive rages became brutal enough I finally had to walk away. He became desperate after that, using every channel he could to reconnect. But I was done. Enough so that when my website tracker logged a visit from Japan just ten days before he passed away, a visit I knew was his, this ex-friend I had once loved like family felt like a stranger from another life.
He died of a disease that claims the aged and infirm, a middle-aged man who had reached the last season of his life. Now he is a signpost that tells me I am approaching the autumn of my days in a body that, though I no longer take this for granted, will likely grow older than his. These things I know and for these things I grieve. Yet I accept them like the lessons of the sakura: all things in their season, even friendships unable to withstand the inexorable test of human time.