When Friends Abandon You. Mourning the Loss of a Friendship.

It seems unfair that on top of grief, we may wind up mourning the loss of a friendship, too. A common experience that I hear about is the drastic change in what we thought were close friendships after we lose someone. Many of us completely lose friends during the grieving stage, whether it’s anticipatory grief or early grief or a little further down the line. Suddenly, the people we thought would always be there alongside us become distant, removed, and sometimes, disappear altogether. And it’s something that can happen with family members and coworkers, too, but friends seem to be a little different from those experiences. With coworkers, you’re usually not as close to them on a deeper emotional level, so sometimes it’s easier to just let go of certain expectations with them. With family, we often feel more tied or obligated to each other because of that relationship, so even if it changes after a death, you still most likely talk to them occasionally (unless they do something toxic and unforgivable, that is) even if you’re feeling isolated from them.

With friends, they can just…well, leave. And I have heard many stories of how they do just that. I, too, have had the same experience, so know that it’s not just you and you’re not alone. Losing friendships on top of an already painful loss can not only be baffling but frustrating and even enraging. It adds to the grief we’re already suffering from. It doesn’t make sense to us, especially when we’re feeling so shattered inside. We can’t walk away from the pain of our loss but our friends can. And often, that’s what they decide to do.

Behaviors That Might Happen After Loss

These are some of the ways in which people may respond to you after the death of your loved one. You may have noticed this already depending on where you are in your grief journey. These behaviors may not necessarily occur right after. Sometimes, they may not even happen until much later, such as after the first year. Many, many people complain about how they feel even more if not fully abandoned as they enter the second year and on. There is an unspoken rule in our society that after the first year, grief should be over as that’s the standard time for mourning. So, you may find, instead, your relationships changing long after death has actually occurred. Regardless of if or when it happens, it will most likely hurt you considerably, which is completely understandable.

• Becoming Distant – This is when your friendships don’t exactly dissolve altogether, but, instead, become the occasional wave from across the room or a text message that consists of only an emoji. You may still make small talk but it’s usually in passing or if you’re the one making the effort.
• They Stop Checking on You – This behavior is sort of in the category of becoming distant, which is why I followed it up here. But sometimes, close friends, who may have once called or texted or stopped by regularly, just stop doing that. Most likely, it’s not intentional, but sometimes it can make grievers feel forgotten. Some friends are good about doing this until the first year is up. After that, there may be a considerable decrease or it ends completely.
• Canceling Constantly – Suddenly, your best friend, who was always ready to hang out with you before, may no longer seem to have time for you. Again, another form of becoming distant. Here, they may tentatively make plans with you, then at the last minute, bail, usually with an excuse that is impossible to argue with (e.g – I had to work late, my son is sick, my car broke down, etc…).
• Ignoring You/Cutting the Conversation Short – This is when you might still interact with the friend, but maybe they don’t really look at you or talk to you anymore. It sounds like it could be awkward, especially if it’s only the two of you, because how can you behave this way if there’s no one else there? But maybe they are constantly on their phones or texting while with you, for example. Or the few times that you are talking together, they may cut you off frequently either to talk about themselves or to someone else or maybe they just walk off as if you weren’t there to begin with. I remember having this kind of thing happen to me. Someone I had become good friends with, or thought I had become good friends with during my caregiving days, began doing this after my husband died. Once, I had crossed a room in order to talk to her, and the second I got there, she looked at something or someone over my shoulder and then said to me very abruptly, “Excuse me, I have to go,” before walking off. It kind of jolted me and I tried to write it off as some kind of fluke but in further encounters, she continued to behave this way towards me. In fact, she moved into never really acknowledging my existence anymore. It was completely different than before he died.
• Ghosting – The previous example brings me to this behavior. The most common one I hear about after grief occurs is ghosting. This is where your friend disappears completely and there’s never really an explanation as to why. Though, personally, I think of it as ghosting even if they do give you an explanation. Like, if they tell you one day that they just really need to focus on something else like career or health or family and won’t be around too much. But then, you never really hear from them again and any time you try to reach out just to reconnect on some level, you are met with silence. I had another friend who did this to me, which I will talk about a little further below.

How You Might React To These Behaviors

There are so many reactions that you might have if it turns out that the people you had always considered to be your close friends aren’t there for you in the ways you had hoped they would be. And it’s so difficult to have to deal with these extra emotions on top of the grief you feel over your loss. It may seem extremely unfair to feel as if others have sprinkled salt on an already open wound. There are more responses you may have than what I’ve listed here but these are some of the common ways you may find yourself responding emotionally to a situation like this:

• Guilt/Questioning Your Own Worth – Did I Do Something Wrong? – This was a big one for me personally. I asked myself this over and over and retraced all of my actions and conversations endlessly as I tried to make sense of my friends’ behaviors. I still ask myself this from time to time. I wondered if I was too absorbed in my grief. I wondered if I said something wrong. I wondered if I had approached people in a weird way. Did I give off clingy, needy vibes now? Did I ask for too much? Did I isolate myself at all? Why don’t they like me anymore? The list went on and on. It felt like a form of social anxiety. But instead, it was something like grief social anxiety?
• Anger/Frustration/Rage – You may feel incredibly upset at your friend. You might even tell them so if they haven’t completely vanished into thin air. Usually, we want to know why they are behaving certain ways and why they decided to choose this moment of all moments to completely let you down.
• Hurt/Depression/Despair – Of course it hurts when you feel like the people you care about abandon you, especially during a time where you are already hurting pretty badly. It hurts because it’s usually not what you were expecting to happen. And the more blindsided you feel about it, the more it’s going to hurt.
• Confusion – Why did this happen? Could it have been prevented? We just don’t understand this gesture from our friends and it makes grief feel ten times worse because grief is already confusing enough as it is.
• Fear – Will this happen again? Should I even bother to find other friends one day? I know that I’ve asked myself this many times. In fact, I continue to ask myself this because I think it’s become something of an issue for me even now. It’s already difficult for me to make friends as a quiet person. So when I find someone I trust, I tend to be a lot more vulnerable. Well, now, I have even more trouble becoming that vulnerable. Grief has completely changed my abilities and compacities when it comes to trust and certain friendships have made this the case. So, now, I have an extremely difficult time now opening up to anyone.
• Pretending Everything Is Fine – A pretty common reaction among any aspect of grief. Here, you most likely become fearful of saying or doing anything wrong or you just give up altogether. Or maybe you don’t want to be seen as weak or to be pitied. You don’t want to possibly lose any other friends for any reason, so you just try to put on a normal face as much as possible. However, sometimes, the trouble with this is that then everyone thinks you must be all better and then a new set of problems may surface.
• Avoiding Friendships or People in General – To feel so let down in a time of need may cause more trauma to an already super sensitive area within you. It’s an extension of that fear reaction I mentioned above. You may find that you don’t want to see or talk to anyone and you certainly don’t want to develop any kind of relationship because you just can’t handle the pain that might come with it.

My Own Painful Experience

This is a difficult story for me to tell because it still hurts me even now. But I want to share it even though it happened a few years ago because it very much has to do with the topic of friendship abandonment after loss.

I had many good friends that were especially supportive to my family when we were going through my husband’s illness. There were several that stood out but there was this one that really went above and beyond, which makes this story all the more hard to tell. I’m just going to refer to her as “A” since we’re talking about abandonment. I hope that doesn’t come off as weird but I don’t want to use her real name.

Anyway, “A” was the kind of person that everyone loved. When she was your friend, she was your friend 110%. If she took part in a project, she was always one of the ones who contributed the most. She was super friendly, really smart and cared about everyone’s feelings. She told me sincerely and other friends that we shared a few times that she felt her best self when helping others. When we have people like this in our lives, it’s always that much more devestating when they suddenly choose to no longer be in them.

I met “A” in the roughest parts of my caregiving days. When she learned about my difficult personal situation of nursing my husband through cancer while simultaneously being a single mother of four, she befriended me and began doing things like calling to check up on me, bringing by food so I didn’t have to cook some nights, and even taking my kids out occasionally to the movies or parks. When we talked as just two adults, we really seemed to get along so well. We didn’t just talk about me and my problems, I found that a lot of the values I had, she also shared. We talked about goals, books, museums, world issues and how our childhoods had shaped us into the people we were now. The few friends I had at that time were great but “A” was really one of my favorites. After so many months, actually years, of feeling so alone and not really having much adult conversation, having “A” there was just amazing. She seemed to know so much and I found through getting to know her that she often jumped from project to project, community to community, and even made massive career changes. At the time, I admired her sense of adventure and how she was never afraid to try anything new.

After my husband died, our friendship continued for awhile and “A” and her husband even helped me with some grieving and schooling issues with my kids. My kids just loved to visit and spend time with them, especially after losing their father and finding that other people in our lives had either disappeared or were just not emotionally supportive at all.  I enjoyed making art things for her and buying books that I knew she had her eye on. We visited museums together and went out to restaurants and tea/coffee shops when I was able to find a sitter. She was such a good friend to us, I wanted to be a good one to her, too.

During this time, I noticed that “A” had decided to pull back from a lot of activities, though she still remained in touch with some of the people the same way she did with me. She left all the projects in her life at the same time and began doing new ones. And she decided to make another career change. I didn’t think anything of it, even when she mentioned she had let go of some other friendships and was limiting time around certain family members. When I look back on it now, I feel like I should have seen some kind of foreshadowing here but I guess I was just too happy that I was still in her life. I thought, “A” hadn’t gotten rid of me, I must be special to her, too.

So, I’ll never forget the day I received a lengthy email from her basically stating that she was done with our friendship and that she was letting go of a lot of her friendships. She stressed that I shouldn’t take it personally because it wasn’t just me and that she was cutting off everybody now. She said she just needed to move on and do other things that she needed to do, especially with her new career and her own health. “A” also mentioned to me that she had a pattern of taking on situations in which she went overboard with caring and helping others too much and she wanted to stop that now and focus on her own self care. She also said that she wished nothing but good things for me but that she was not a nostalgic person and did not miss what was in the past the way she thought that I did. “A” asked for my blessing, especially after she had helped us so much and said that perhaps in time, she’d be in touch with me again. But to this day, I have not heard from her and that was a few years ago now.

The hardest part was not even my own feelings around this sudden development but having to explain to my kids why “A” had just suddenly dropped out of their lives because they loved her so much. She didn’t even give them a personal goodbye. I felt like she just slipped away as if she’d never known us at all. What do you even say to kids who had already had so many people abandon them? Also, kids who had not only seen their father die but their grandmother as well? Here was yet another person that they had cared deeply about who had just upped and disappeared.

Actually, it was someone who was still alive and choosing to leave and be alive somewhere else that didn’t include them.

I only wanted my kids to remember the good things about her, so I simply told them that “A” needed do some self care and focus on her own health and new career for awhile and that perhaps we’d see her again one day. They accepted this because they understand wanting good health after what they witnessed their father going through trying to survive cancer and ultimately not being able to. But they still miss her very much.

I felt guilty, did I somehow ask too much of “A”? Was I bad friend? Did I not do enough for her in return? Did she feel taken advantage of by me? There it is, like I mentioned in the reactions above, did I do something wrong? Had I been too needy or clingy in my grief? I hadn’t thought so but maybe I was. Did she just feel sorry for me and that’s why we were friends in the first place? Was I just another project for her to feel good about herself and now she was done with the project? She said she needed to do self care but from what I had learned about her, she had a pattern of jumping from project to project, community to community and career to career. Was this her self care? But even so, why did self care mean that we couldn’t be friends anymore?

Most of all, she had said she was not nostalgic and would not miss the past. This probably hurt me the most because what did that even mean? Was she saying that not only was she leaving but that she wouldn’t even miss me or my kids either? And she also said that she didn’t miss things the way that I did. Did that mean that she was tired of my grief? That she thought I should just move on from the death of my husband and stop missing what could no longer be? That any steps I was taking in moving on were not really moving on at all? This is a very common response from people who have not been through a loss like this. The attitude that you should just get over it. The idea that she might be saying that not only hurt terribly but made me quite angry, as well as the comment that I should just offer her my blessing because she had done nice things for us in the past. It didn’t sit right with me to have someone tell me that I basically should not feel too upset about them disappearing because they had done other good things. It made me feel like I just owed her something now and the good feelings from those things somehow felt lessened.

So, as you can see, all of the reactions above, I went through with the loss of my friendship with “A”. And to be perfectly honest, it has very much shaped how much I open up to other possible friendships now. I no longer feel willing to open up as much as I did before and I avoid getting too close with many people as a result. Overall, after my experience with “A”, I’ve somehow felt like a fool. I’ve been afraid that maybe I became someone who depended on her too much accidentally (whether it’s true or not) and so now, I want to make sure I don’t burden anyone else or possibly make them feel like I’m just using them. Perhaps one day that will go away or at least, improve, but because I had so many other emotionally charged things happen already, with very signficant loved ones dying, I’m not sure when or even if that will happen.

Considering Their Perspective

In my case with “A”, I tried very hard to understand the why of all this. Okay, she had mentioned needing self care. I mean, that sounds like a valid thing to want. After all, in cancer caregving support and later in grief support, this is the #1 thing we hear. We are always advised to focus on self care because it’s important to make enough time for it so that we are able to function in life at our best. “A” had mentioned needing self care and that she was tired of caring for others. I can’t fault her for wanting this. I can consider this perspective and understand it, but somehow, I am not feeling better about it.

That might be all you can do, too. You may have the same mixed feeling where you can understand it but that doesn’t mean it takes away the pain of losing a friendship that meant a lot to you.

Other things I considered from their angle:

• Perhaps she felt like she could no longer relate to me.
• Fear that what happened to me could happen to her.
• She wanted to get back to her normal life which included freedom from the reality of my situation (this is super common as other people get tired of grief).
• Maybe my grief situation required too much involvement.
• Maybe I would behave the same way if I hadn’t had all this grief and loss happen to me. No one understands grief until it happens to them.
• Maybe my life reminded her of something painful that she hadn’t told me about.
• Maybe they don’t know what to say or how to react on any level.
• Maybe it’s something else entirely.

These are not all but just some of the more common examples of what may be happening on their end that we discussed in therapy and grief support. These are often some of the reasons why we suddenly lose friendships during the trauma of losing people that we love.

The thing is, can we ever really know or understand their perspective? Can they ever really know or understand ours? I feel like sometimes, there is only so much we can know about each other because we are ourselves and not them. Just as they are themselves and not us. I guess all we can do is try and maybe be as grateful as we’re able to be for what good memories we were provided through their friendship.

Letting Go

Again, I do not know all of the answers. I’m not anywhere close, in fact. I’m also not a doctor or therapist with a lot of training in psychology and how the human psyche can operate. I can only go over and over all of my experiences in my own mind, as I’m sure you are doing if you have felt abandoned by people you thought were your friends. I can consider their perspectives and what might be going on and the why of all of it. And what it probably comes down to is that I just need to let go because I can’t control them. I can’t force them to be in my life. I don’t even want to have to force anyone to be in my life, especially if they don’t want to be. We only want to be surrounded with people who love us and us them and everyone wants to be together.

But letting go is something that takes time. It’s another loss and another grief that we have to deal with on top of all of the others. And it’s a loss that feels severely painful in a different way. See, our loved ones who have died – they are physically gone. They can’t come back. But when we have friendships with people who are still physically alive yet these people chose to leave us anyway and exist somewhere else without us is a different kind of hurt. These people still exist in body. We know that they’re still out there, alive in the world..somewhere. It’s just that we’re no longer included.

So, part of our grief journey, unfortunately, is going to include these new losses that may have occurred as a result of having grief in the first place.

Someone once asked me, what if “A” came back? Would you be friends with her again? How would you respond?

I thought about it for awhile before I told them that honestly, I don’t think I could respond to her at all. My trust is gone. How could I have faith in a friendship that I know may vanish at any moment depending on the other person’s whims? Emotionally, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. And I certainly don’t want my children to get hurt again, too.

Do you have a personal experience with losing friendships after death? What kind of things did you go through emotionally and how did you work through them? Are you still working through them? Please let me and others know in the comments. Let’s all support each other because this stuff can really suck sometimes.

Take care,

Nikki