5:04am March 5, 2012

“

We were talking about how all my friends split after the accident.

“It happens EVERY time. EVERY time.” says Sandy Ford. “Like we’ve got a guy injured, I don’t know, this week. And he’s 32 and he has this cute little fiancée that’s there holding his hand. That there’s crying. Weeping, weeping. All this stuff. And. Unless he has an extremely good recovery she is NOT going to hang in there.

"And when I see high school kids come in. The first three weeks there are kids everywhere. I mean, they’re flockin’ in here and everyone is suddenly John’s best buddy. I mean, everyone has known him since a baby. Everyone is a good friend.

"And all you gotta do is sit back and watch. If, outside of his family, he winds up with two people that will stick with him for six months — and some people will stay six months — but at a year, if you have one person who stayed with you, you’re pretty lucky.

"Strokes. I think a lot of times they don’t split. If you’ve been married for fifty years and your wife or husband has a stroke, you’re probably not gonna split.

"But now you take head injury, and the biggest population is males between the ages of 16 and 25. Now they don’t have that same long bonding with friends. Even if they’re married, they still don’t have the same history of bonding. Friends invariably leave. I daresay even with strokes, their friends leave.”

Sandy offered this paradox; for some people, if their friends didn’t leave, they probably wouldn’t have done as well. Weird, huh?

The explanation for people getting in the wind, leaving, is always the same: “They probably don’t know how to handle it.” That’s a cliché everybody uses. People want to be nice and not point the finger too hard. I’ve heard that line literally dozens of times. One of my best buddies, Kay, 73 years old and legally blind, has heard it about some of her own kids.

“It’s different people that you come to know after the injury,” Sandy Ford went on. “And I do think some catastrophic things can happen and some good things come out of it. And I DO think it’s catastrophic when all your friends walk out on ya.”

My friend Stevie, the writer, said having your friends leave happens to everybody. I want to say pure and simple: not all at once or the same way as it happens to people who have been hurt or handicapped, it don’t.

But ever since the accident everybody’s all the time telling me what’s happening to me. Stevie the writer’s got this thing that it’s very hip to turn the obvious on its ear. “They didn’t leave,” he said. “You left.”

He really said that.

Having all these people go away and ignore you IS fiendish punishment. Some people have walked by me on the street and pretended they didn’t recognize me. Like, you NEED interaction with other people. On the other hand, baby, if they’re gonna go, let ‘em go.

”

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