I can say this, I know many many many many people. My wife and I own a veterinarian clinic so of coarse we have tons of people who want to be friends. As you mentioned RLDubbya, there are very few people regardless of age who are true to the end friends.
I've got a little story for you about my next door neighbor best friend. Towards the beginning of last year he was beginning to get a little bit too short with me at times. This is all very shortly after his best friend of 40 years passed and he was progressively getting more and more short tempered. We would be doing something or screwing around and next thing you know I'm getting yelled at like a child. Now we're good friends so of coarse an hour or so later we're good to go and everything is okay. It was getting to a point though where it was really taking a toll on me. So a day after he yelled at me for something really really stupid I sat down and wrote him a letter. I explained to him what he was doing and even brought up our age difference. If we were supposed to be real friends, I explained that friends didn't treat friends that way and he would have never treated his friend whop just passed that way. I told him how much I understood the frustration and emotions of his loss and how it still affected him, but I also told him that if he couldn't find a more effective way to channel that frustration, that I was willing to step away from our friendship. I also told him that if my letter angered him and he wanted to step away from our friendship, that I was willing to risk that too.
Turns out he read the letter then turned and handed it to his wife. She read it and looked at him and said, "Every damn word in here is true and you've just been an ass to people recently and you need to get your shit together."
I don't know much more about what was said and he and I have never spoken about the letter again. All I do know is we were sitting around a neighborhood fire a few nights later, having some beers and he just walks up to me and looks at me and says, "Hey buddy, I just want you to know we're good." From that day forward I can honestly say our friendship is better and healthier then it has ever been. I've literally not been yelled at a single time. I screw up when we are doing things and he is much more understanding about mistakes and is much better about his reactions.
I guess the whole point of my story, friendship goes two ways. You have said yourself you may have treated people kind of poorly on your end at times even though at others you were overly generous. As evidence by your post you're still here and none of us ever know what today or tomorrow will bring. The only advice I can really give you from my experience is don't automatically give up on everybody and at the same time give yourself a good hard look and ask yourself if you are treating people how you would want to be treated, 100% of the time. We're men, we suck at talking. Luckily I was raised by a woman, so I am able to sit down and have conversations with my wife to keep our marriage healthy. Everybody has marital problems, but being able to actually talk about them is extremely important. Just because you're a "man", don't let yourself be too much of a man to express some emotion from time to time.
You have terminal cancer and you deal with everyday knowing it could be your last. I see you even have a blog about how you spend your days. I haven't checked it out, but I would ask this question. Do you spend as much time talking to those close to you about your feelings on things as you do writing them down and sharing them with the world? You may or may not, I honestly do not know, but if you do, that could be a good place to start.
Good luck with your journey, and please axe the end it all talk. Even on the internet I have seen cops at houses for comments like those on forums. Keep fighting buddy and stay positive.
Amoo,
I'm actually a very positive guy - I would ask of you that you don't judge me from one post. I'm not pissed or anything, just being straightforward, as I do appreciate your straightforwardness and the words you have written. Thank you for those.
I'm also not certain that I agree that any of this is my fault - I'm always, always, however, more than willing to accept responsibility that I might have blinders on to certain behaviors. But I have spent many, many hundreds of hours thinking all this through. Outside of one period in my life, in the mid-80s when my world fell apart and I became addicted to drugs, I've been quite good to people.
There's not necessarily a logical explanation; however, there is a psychological explanation at play. I'm in palliative care, and meet with psychs periodically. The one thing that they have told me about my situation is that I need to get used to it - they have found that terminal cancer patients, and only terminal cancer patients, experience nearly all their friends suddenly dropping away for no clear reason. The current psych theory is that it is tied to a fear of mortality; not the patient's mortality, but rather the friends' individual mortalities. This fits nicely with some behaviors I've seen from the one guy I mentioned knowing in a professional setting: whenever we got together, I realized that the conversations always became about him, his psychological state, his emotional state, his failing marriage, his strained partnership with other owners of the business. He never was willing to talk about my needs. If I brought a need up (for example, I brought up things ranging from helping me shovel snow to being one of the people on the list to answer any questions about my end of life desires), he found a way to immediately dismiss my need and steer the conversation back to his worries about his wife's approach to the marriage, or how he feels he can't really open up to his therapist.
Anyhow: I do my best to be positive. I work quite hard at that, actually: you have to in my shoes. In fact, one of my current projects is to put together a raffle to benefit the MPN Research Foundation. I've also had to take nearly full responsibility for understanding the nature of my cancer and the organic damage which it has caused - the last hematologist told us, back in April, that I should just go home and die, because there was no chance that I could live for a month with everything wrong with me, and he had no idea where to begin with treatment. I have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours researching the hematopoietic process humans, what goes wrong with this cancer, and how best to fight it. This summer, I put together my own treatment protocol, using a combination of drugs used for other purposes as well as very experimental drugs that can only be purchased for research lab purposes. My treatment actually had decent success: the hepatologist / GI specialist told me that never, in his 20 years of practice, had he seen a case of esophageal varices healing so completely as to appear that they never existed. My red blood cell counts jumped by 2 full points; my spleen shrank, visibly. I suspect that my liver has improved (if I wasn't terminal, I would be placed on the transplant list), and the hepatologist has finally agreed to order an ultrasound and full biopsy to check.
I have also, along the way, helped many other patients who are having difficulty in understanding their bloodwork; their hematologist's recommendations; and other lab results. They send a copy of their medical records to me, and we spend up to 3 hours on the phone reviewing them and getting them to a point of comfort in their understanding of their situation.
Hardly, I think, the values of somebody who is negative.
Finally: I apologize if I offended you with my offhand comment about death and the end of life. The cops are welcome to stop by at any point; since my township cannot afford fulltime police protection, I'd be quite angered as a citizen that they were wasting their time on me, and would make sure that the trustees were made fully aware of it.
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--and not a far step from the reality of friendships under the stress/strain of a demanding illness or disability.