“Stuart, this is a voice from your past. I am the fellow who grew up across the street from you long ago, the boy you played ball with so many afternoons after school. I wonder how you and your family are now. I just wanted to be in touch with you again after all these years.”

With words like these, I called up my old friend (his name is different) after a silence lasting decades. I did so with an expectation that he would welcome hearing from me and might even propose our getting together for old time’s sake. In the past, such calls to old friends had often produced happy results.

To my shock, my boyhood friend expressed no interest in me whatsoever. He responded to my words with a minimum of his own and made clear his lack of enthusiasm for renewed contact. His indifference to me made me feel terribly let down as I tried to cope with unexpected rejection.

On another occasion I telephoned someone who had been a friend during his graduate school days. We had shared much, Jack and I, and that community of interest extended to his wife. I considered the two of them among my bonded friends and expected that personal relationship to last through the indefinite future.

For a long time Jack has lived in a southern state, far from my own. So when I found an obituary for one of his former mentors, a person whom he had been close to. I telephoned him to share this news and to wonder if he would be coming back to Cambridge for his teacher’s funeral.

Here, again, I met a surprisingly cool response. Jack did not seem to appreciate my having called nor did he express much of any interest in me. The changes that had taken place in my life since we had last been in contact failed to excite any questions on his part. My questions about his own family he answered only perfunctorily.

Another married couple with whom I was once close still live in a Boston suburb near me. From conversation with the woman’s brother at a party, I know that they and their now grown-up children are well and flourishing. Years ago, we had shared varied experiences, yet I have had no contact with them since. They have not called me even once nor I them.

These three sets of lost friends, the two couples and my boyhood neighbor, strike me as examples of what happens during a long life. Along the way, we lose contact with many people who have once been close to us. They may still play a part in our psyches but no longer do we encounter one another bodily. We have passed out of their lives and they from ours, except that we may continue to think of them, as I do.

The reasons why this estrangement happens are probably many, perhaps different in each instance. I often speculate about what I may have done to precipitate the loss of active friendship with some people. The answer, of course, may be nothing. As the circumstances of their lives have changed along with their interests, they may simply have moved on to new friends and other involvements.

But that does not stop me from wondering if, in some instances, I was at fault. My situation is complicated by the fact that 30 years ago I took the radical step of departing from my first career, the priesthood. For those friends accustomed to seeing me as a counselor and spiritual guide, it may have been alienating to encounter me in a different guise. Catholics, especially, could have found it difficult to accept my having surrendered the role in which they had first known me.

As we go through the various stages of life, however, we all experience changes in our tastes, including the people we like to associate with. So my feelings of loss and, in some instances, rejection probably do not merit self-accusation. Yet, I often wonder if I have said or done something that has induced them to stop considering me a friend.

It’s very different when you lose friends to death. Then, despite the physical absence of the person, the friendship seems secured in place. Nothing is going to change the place that this friend holds in your heart except that he or she may come to be even more precious. This experience now marks my inner life much more than in the past.

The loss of friends still alive does find compensation through the new friends one acquires through the years. But that does not stop me from remembering those of the past. They contributed something important to my life despite the ending of our relationship. I still care about them and hold open the possibility that, in some instances at least, they care about me. But, in the absence of any evidence, I must guess at what happened to our friendship.

Richard Griffin