RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.: Saying goodbye to an old friend meant saying ‘hello again’ to others

What if we’re doing “life” wrong? As human beings, we’re taught from an early age to strive, to look ahead and to assume that our destiny is waiting for us down the road. Getting into college. Landing our first job. Getting married. Starting a family. Brighter days are out there. Success, joy and fulfillment are around the corner. Just work harder, we tell ourselves. And be patient.

But what if that’s not right? What if we’ve already lived our best versions of ourselves? What if the most emotionally satisfying relationships we’re ever going to have are in the past? What if the secret to happiness isn’t the acquaintance you’re going to make tomorrow but the old and true friends you grew up around — the ones with whom you shared so many yesterdays?

In 2020, while sequestered during the infancy of COVID-19, I made a point of tracking down — and calling up — a half-dozen guys I’d gone to elementary school with in the 1970s. We’d grown up in a small farming town in central California with fewer than 10,000 people. A few of these old friends I hadn’t spoken to since the night of our high school graduation, in 1985. Three had joined the Marines, and one had become an architect. But one never lost touch.

For more than five decades, as I moved around the country, my friend Rudy would reach out and make the effort to stay connected. That’s the key to maintaining friendships, you know. You have to put in the time.

According to Jeffrey Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas who has studied the concept of friendship, it takes around 50 hours spent together to go from acquaintances to friends. Put in 90 hours and you can upgrade from casual chums to good friends. More than 200 hours and you can become confidants.

Rudy always put in the effort, and I reciprocated. From college football games to weddings to trips to Las Vegas to countless meals with my fellow foodie, we were together through it all.

The only reason I knew that a friend had retired or gotten divorced or become a grandma was because Rudy kept track of everyone and everything. I was awful at that, but he was a master at staying connected.

We met in second grade, when we were 7 or 8. We blinked and we were in our mid-50s with the scars collected from the journey.

That’s where our story ends. Several weeks ago, not long after we had gotten together for dinner at a seafood restaurant near San Diego, I lost Rudy to cancer. He left behind two college-age children, who had years earlier also lost their mother to the same grotesque disease.

In the days that followed, feeling the loss of Rudy like a sword in my heart, I would burst out crying. I looked for every excuse I could to avoid the funeral because I knew that going would make tangible a new reality that I didn’t want to accept.

Yet I couldn’t stay away. I had to pay my respects. Taking my friend to his rest meant taking a trip home — 297 miles up the interstate and 50 years back in time. That quick 36-hour visit for the services was packed with three significant experiences: sending off Rudy, of course, with a service at the local Catholic church, across the street from the same elementary school where my friend and I had played marbles. Returning to my hometown, with its mind-bending mixture of the familiar and the foreign. And reminiscing with dozens of old friends from high school and even a few from grade school.

The first experience was excruciating. The second was surreal. But the third was joyous. Unexpectedly, it was that last one — seeing old friends — that really spun me out. A month later, I’m still spinning.

We had come to grieve the loss of our friend, and yet — as we lingered outside the church after the service — we couldn’t stop smiling and laughing as we remembered better times. We were so happy to see one another, and — as we hugged, said goodbye and retreated into our respective lives — we vowed to do a better job of staying in touch.

It was beautiful. And it was exactly how Rudy would have wanted it.

Thanks for being such a good and true friend, brother. We’ll see you again.

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, “Ruben in the Center,” is available through every podcast app.