The Weight of Old Friendships
- Sital Bhargava DO, MS
- May 27
- 4 min read
Adult friendships are hard. But you know what’s even harder? Losing the childhood friendships, you thought would survive every stage of life.
And when I say childhood, I don’t mean elementary school. I mean that long stretch of time before adulthood fully settled in — before marriages, careers, children, and grief reshaped us. My twenties still felt young enough to be considered childhood in their own way. Honestly, at twenty-eight, I was still very much a kid.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in eleven years. She was one of my closest friends throughout my second and third decades of life. We raised our kids together. We lived through the highs and lows of what I can only describe as “early adulthood” together. Our friendship lasted over fifteen years, until we started working together — and somewhere along the way, everything changed.
Recently, she sent me a text with old pictures she had found on her computer. We exchanged a few messages, mostly reminiscing about our children and our passage into older women. But underneath the conversation sat something heavier — years of hurt, silence, and unresolved emotion. At least on my end.
I had actually texted her the previous October to wish her a happy fiftieth birthday, and I never heard back. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised. Our friendship hadn’t ended quietly. There had been shouting, hurt feelings, and the kind of emotional fallout that lingers long after people stop speaking.
When I heard from her fourteen days ago, I was shocked. Partly because it had been eleven years, but also because I had just spoken about her in therapy less than six hours earlier. My therapist had encouraged me to write her a letter to process some of my unresolved feelings. I didn’t have the emotional energy to write it before her text arrived, but after hearing from her, I wrote it the next day.
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The Letter
Dear E,
It surprised me to hear from you yesterday. When I texted you in October, I was feeling nostalgic, but I was also relieved when you didn’t reply. Part of me assumed there was still too much hurt left between us.
When I think about things eleven years ago, I get very sad by everything that happened. And I reflexively think back to twenty-five years ago when things were so different. I am not sure I have ever felt so protected or seen by anyone- almost unconditionally. You made me feel so safe and seen. And I think about what you did for me all those years- driving to be with me for IVF, hiding your pregnancy to avoid hurting me, volunteering to watch all my kids without thinking twice and so much more.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how things changed so drastically once we started working together. Somewhere along the way, your love no longer felt unconditional, though I now wonder if I should have had any expectation of that. I carried so much fear and insecurity then. No matter how hard I tried, I constantly felt like I was disappointing you.
Losing our friendship felt like losing an entire version of my life at once. Not just you, but your family too. The routines, the holidays, the comfort of knowing you were there. When I looked at the picture of T yesterday, I barely recognized her. Then I realized that when I think about all of your children, I still picture them exactly as they were eleven years ago. Somewhere in my mind they remain frozen in time, while the rest of us kept growing older without each other.
I also think losing your friendship became tangled up with losing medicine. At the same time our relationship ended, I left my career as a typical physician. Almost overnight, I lost my patients, my professional identity, and the life I thought I had built. I wasn’t just grieving a friendship — I was grieving the person I thought I was supposed to become. And building a whole different life and career at the same time.
The reason I am writing this letter is to apologize. I could have handled things very differently. I know it is too late to change what happened, and I accept that. Although our conversation yesterday felt somewhat superficial, it was civil, and I genuinely cared about what you had to say and as always, I felt like you cared about me.
In the end, I loved the work I did when we worked together, and I grew up so much as a doctor. But in the end, I must think twice about whether it was worth the price of our friendship.
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What Friendships Represent
Maybe that’s what makes old friendships so difficult to grieve. They are never just about one person. They hold entire versions of ourselves inside them — younger selves who were still becoming, still hopeful, still convinced life would unfold differently. And when those friendships end, the loss echoes far beyond the relationship itself. Sometimes reconnecting years later doesn’t heal everything. Sometimes it simply reminds us that even after all this time, certain people will always carry pieces of our story that no one else can fully understand.
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