The Silence of Our Friends

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

**********

Dear Kate,

Let me speak for the silent friends.

No, let me speak again, for the silence of these wordless friends.

I can understand: what are they to say when we land ourselves in an unspeakable situation?  What are they to give us but silence?

Say, your relationship broke down.  A divorce, a fallout with family, a toxic work environment that killed more than your career.  You hit someone with your car your stick your words and ran away.  Now you can run no more.  You gathered your courage, contained your shame to make a phone call and tell your friend.  What are they supposed to say?

When things go well, celebratory language comes easy, always in season.  I, your friend, going to your wedding, would bring with me no hesitation.  If there's any judgement in me I would suspend it in the name of make-believe and well-wish and, yes, friendship.  Your story is as good as you claim it is, and I wouldn't second-guess the role you want me to play in it.  And, truly, I do agree your man is a great man.  Lucky gal, set up for life, happily ever after.

The language of disease and deterioration and death we haven't allowed, haven't thought it necessary to cultivate.  The closest we've come was to its edge, where mild disappointments once laid during our years of invincible youth, endless summers, Christmasy winters.  It was a good run and we just kept running, prodding each other on to take in and act on expectations and prescriptions we weren't strong enough, mature enough, experienced enough to resist, never mind question.

You could say the prior generations, our elders failed us.  The government, the school, and especially the church (considering her vocation and mandate), all dropped the ball big time.  These people are ahead of us.  They knew what's to come next but failed to warn us.  In fact they insisted the way they dropped the ball is a great way to drop any and we should drop ours likewise to honor their failures.  Live; fail; repeat.

I got in too deep with strangers
Thinking they could help me find my way
But nobody warned me of the dangers
And it's always the young and foolish that have to pay

Now let's go back to our friends, to ourselves, to our non-speaking when words of grace and hope are most needed.

Well, we don't have any.  No words that don't come off as condescension, a childish tongue to untangle an adult situation.  Our cheerleaders don't know how to cry, and if they do, they are too busy getting back on track to cheer themselves on down the same sunny path that we once merrily shared.  We haven't prayed, alone and together, to yearn for the strange tongue of wisdom and weakness.  We reap what we sow--no, let sowed on us.

How can we have or be a true friend if we don't want truth to speak into our lives?

Yours, Alex

**********

Dear Alex,

I have been silenced without thoughts from this quote last week. You gifted it to me as silently as it seeped into bone and heart. The weight of King’s words has anchored more unspoken words in weightlessness and freedom, his life mission in the end weighing on our minds and souls, archenemy of cowardice, silence for a decision personal and public to start, to end.

King lived to his end in fleshed-out words for one cause without a satisfying end: justice through nonviolence. Words of foes or silence of friends could not bend him at the mountaintop. At age 39 on the balcony, he was permanently silenced by a sniper’s bullet that lodged in his neck.

To another end three years back from this silenced start, Malcolm X, also at 39, was assassinated for a similar cause in civil rights movement. In different shades of language from King, the words of Malcolm X funneled to violence, a sword pulled to silence friends or rivals.

I wonder: what about your end? How will you be remembered?

To our end, friends may say much or little about us or another so it is not the absence of words that hurt or scar. We are barely quiet today, chattering around the block, clocking around the chattering in unprecedented 50+ shades of grey and neon on selfies and social internet. If anything, we will not remember any silence of friends.

And this fortune of words aplenty on our ends vs. the poverty in silence about our End may be where the challenge lies in us. I have talked too much over nothing much to any end, leaving silence on everything else that matters most in the end.

I am going to stop writing now. Out to end we start. Live for an end worthy of remembering.

Yours, Kate