What is a friend?

The passing of someone close to me and my family recently, someone I have known for more than 60 years, has caused me to reflect on the nature of the layers, classifications if you will, of friendship. Gen, as he was known to my family, was an extraordinary person.

Mohammed Ali defined friend as someone you would not hesitate laying your life on the line for. On the face of it, that’s a defining qualification but not, when you stop and think about it, a good enough criterion. I would lay my life on the line for a child, even a stranger child, I saw in danger. Soldiers lay their lives on the line for their country, but does that make their country a friend, or is it more than that?

More intelligent people than I have analyzed why we make friends, what happens to the dopamine levels or recesses of the brain’s response centers or hormonal responses when making, keeping, sharing with friends. I am honestly not interested — in this moment of grief — what scientific effects Gen had upon me and my family. 

And yet, his influence on us — and ours on him — was profound in ways that transcend the momentary criteria of laying one’s life on the line. Why?

In a sense, Gen and I were bonded. Indeed, I often found my moral compass being influenced by his guidance when I was a child and he was the “big kid” to my brother Michael and me, besides being the actual big brother to Christopher, a few years younger than he. 

Gen never bullied the three of us, he never looked down on us … we watched the girls follow him around on the beach on Long Island, slightly envious of his appeal, athletic ability and charisma. And yet, he always included us. I remember him as encouraging fun, including a contest for this 7-year-old, off a tree fort to see who could pee farther.

Later on, when he returned from Navy service in the Vietnam era, he was more subdued, but there was always that smile, that ability to laugh at our more youthful goofs. 

In the following decades we often stayed with Gen (in Patterson, N.Y.), and he was as good (if not better) a father to my boys than I was, as faithful a friend to me and, always, as close a brother-in-law to my wife Sandy as could be imagined. 

We shared dogs (from our litter), he met and courted a wonderful woman, who, true to form, adopted us, and we her as family. He married Laura partially because my wife’s parents, who loved Gen as we did, told him, “You had better marry her before you lose her.” He did, on my birthday.

So, what is this friendship exactly, after decades? Was it just that we happened to be kindred spirits, the two families, the four boys on summer vacations on Long Island that meshed, grew to deeply understand one another in times of innocence and non-pretense? 

Surely, that is part of it. When I lost my brother Michael three years ago, I felt this vacuum inside, this deliberate ache of what I can never relive or hold or share with one who actually knows who I am. 

But what also strikes me now, as I reminisce about our joint friend, is that Gen became part of who I am, not just who he was. Michael too — that was a missing part of understanding in my grief for his passing. 

What I am, what my friends are, are evermore. And those parts of who I am and who Christopher is still, will have to be taken out and dusted often now that Gen’s and Michael’s examples are physically not around to remind. 

So, yes, there’s grief at the loss for friends lost, but there’s hope too — the best of them are still within us.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.