Catching up

Tonight I met up with some friends for a drink. It was organised by one of my friends who moved away a few years ago but he was back to see his family for Christmas. He is off to Australia for a month and I am dead jealous.

He is a remarkable chap. About five years ago he came home from work one evening and his wife had cleared all her stuff out of the house and disappeared. He was totally devastated and hadn’t expected it at all. After about 3 or 4 months of persistence, I managed to track his wife down and persuaded her to meet up for a bit of a chat to find out what was going on. We sat in a restaurant in the Midlands and just talked about what had prompted her to leave and in the circumstances that she had chosen to do so. Then I had to drive back down to London and talk to her husband and break the news to him that she still wasn’t willing to see him. It had been just a brief return to the UK and she was leaving the country again the next day. To see the pain and loss of hope in my friend’s face was hard to take, but probably not as hard to take as the news was for him.

A few weeks later she did agree to see him and a while later they were reconciled. They moved away to try to start again and I went up to see them not long before Christmas. I asked my friend how it was going and he just said to me "Not great, but she has said she won’t leave before Christmas". He phoned me on New Year’s Day to say she’d gone - but this time she had told him she was going.

A couple of years later he went out with my housemate, which sadly had a negative impact on my friendship with him because it felt weird to phone him or go and visit him. But they split up about a year ago now and it has been good to rebuild our friendship.

He is a very resilient bloke and whilst I don’t suppose you ever totally get over such things, he has coped much better than most probably would have. I don’t know what it is that gives some people the ability to heal and recover, but my friend most certainly has that ability. Thank goodness.