My best friend and I knew each other for the better part of sixty years. We met in grade school, and after that, he was just my guy. Jerry. Jer, to me.
If I needed help moving something heavy, I called him. When I didn’t know what to do about one of my kids, I called him. When my wife died, and I didn’t know how to be a person for a while, he was there without making me talk more than I wanted to.
He died in March, and I knew his funeral would be hard. What I didn’t expect was to leave it realizing something about both of us that I’d somehow never noticed while he was alive.
The room was full of people, and I was the only friend
His wife was there. His three daughters. Cousins whose names I knew from decades of stories. Former coworkers, people he’d mentored, neighbors from three different houses. The room was full.
But as I stood there, I started looking for the other guys. The group of old buddies I assumed would be in a corner somewhere, swapping stories, the way it works in movies.
They weren’t there. There were men who knew him from work. Men who’d lived next door. But there was nobody else who’d known Jer since he was eleven.
I wasn’t one friend among several. I was the friend. The whole category.
And then came the part that sat heavier. He had been that for me too. I just hadn’t noticed because he was still alive, and when your one person is still there, one feels like enough.
We never built a friend group because we never needed one
It didn’t happen on purpose.
When we were kids, friendship was automatic. School put us in the same room five days a week, and the rest took care of itself. We didn’t have to schedule anything or maintain anything. We were just there.
Then came work, marriages, kids, houses. There were other men along the way. Coworkers I liked. Other dads from the soccer sideline. A neighbor I’d talk to over the fence for twenty minutes and then not see for a month.
Those were real, but they belonged to specific places, and when the place changed, the relationship went with it.
I never thought to build what people now call a friend group, because I already had the person I called when something mattered. One good friend felt like plenty for about fifty years.
And it’s not like I was lonely before March. I have family. I have people I talk to. But if you’d asked me to name my friends, plural, I would have given you one name. I didn’t think that was a problem. It was just how it was.
Then it became none, and I understood what I’d been leaning on.
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It’s not the big conversations I lost, it’s the ordinary ones
People assume the hardest part of losing a close friend is not having anyone to share deep feelings with. That’s part of it. But what catches me more often is the ordinary stuff.
I’ll see something ridiculous at the hardware store and reach for my phone before I remember. I’ll catch a score and want to call Jer to complain. I got a repair estimate last month that seemed insane, and the first thing I thought was I should ask him if this is unreasonable, because he would’ve known.
My kids are good to me. My daughter-in-law checks in. But those relationships aren’t interchangeable with what I had. Jer knew sixty years of backstory. I could say half a sentence, and he’d know the whole thing, who I was talking about, why it mattered, what happened the last time.
With anybody else, the same conversation takes twenty minutes of explanation, and by the time I’ve set it up, I don’t want to tell the story anymore.
That shorthand is the thing I have no idea how to replace. It wasn’t built. It accumulated. And you can’t accumulate sixty years of context with somebody new when you’re 72.
Some Saturdays we’d just sit on his porch and not say much of anything for a half hour. That sounds like nothing, but try finding somebody you can be silent with and have it feel like company instead of awkwardness. That took decades too.
One Saturday last fall, I mentioned that my daughter had been short with me on the phone. Before I could say anything else, Jer said, “She does this every October. It’s about her mother.”
He was right. My wife’s birthday was in October, and my daughter always got testy around it. I’d forgotten the pattern. Jer hadn’t, because he’d been watching my family longer than some of my family had.
That’s what I lost. Not a category of relationship. A specific person who could do that.
And nobody giving me advice seemed to understand that part.
Everybody says go make some friends, and nobody means it the way it sounds
The advice was always the same: Join something. Volunteer. Talk to the guys at the golf course. I hear it from my kids, from my doctor, from articles my daughter sends me.
They’re not wrong, exactly. But go make a new best friend at 72 sounds almost insulting, like I’m supposed to hold auditions for a role that someone held for six decades.
Someone new can’t remember me at 12, or at 25, or in the bad year when I almost left my job because I hated my boss and he talked me out of it in a parking lot. They can’t, because they weren’t there.
For a while, I let that be the end of it. Nobody could replace him, so why try?
But the longer I sat with it, the more I started thinking that maybe I’d spent fifty years assuming one person would always be enough to carry the entire thing.
Maybe the answer isn’t finding another “one guy”
I’ve started doing small things.
When my neighbor asks if I want to grab coffee after our morning walk, I say yes instead of waving him off. I called a former coworker I’d been meaning to call for two years.
I stayed after golf last week and talked to a man I’ve been trading jokes with since before the pandemic, and I learned his wife has the same birthday as mine.
These men aren’t going to become what Jer was. I’m not looking for that.
But I think I finally understand that the one-guy model, the way men my age do friendship, works until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, you’re standing in a room realizing you put everything in one place and the place is gone.
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Missing him isn’t a problem I need to solve
I don’t regret it. Sixty years with someone like Jer was extraordinary, and I know how lucky I was. Plenty of men never get that with anybody.
I’m not going to turn missing him into a self-improvement project where I force myself to socialize because somebody says it’s healthy. I’m allowed to miss the exact person I want and sit with the fact that no new friendship will be what that one was.
But I keep coming back to the funeral. At first, looking around that room and seeing that I was the only guy friend felt like one more thing he’d left me with. Proof of how alone I was now.
I don’t see it that way anymore. For almost sixty years, each of us had somebody we could call without thinking about whether we were imposing. That is not a small thing to have had.
I can’t get it back, and I don’t want to. What I can do is stop assuming one person will always be enough, simply because for most of my life, one person happened to be.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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