Friendship and Resilience: One Link at a Time

I’ve never been good at maintaining relationships beyond the present moment.

I know people who have maintained friendships since grade school. Grade school. They became friends before they were teenagers and still talk to each other twenty or thirty years later.

I know other people who do yearly trips with college friends. Trips. They board an airplane and fly to another location to play golf, gamble, or whatever it is that friends who have known each other for twenty years do.

These are such foreign concepts to me.

After each move in my life, I started over. Friends from our first apartment in Connecticut became memories once we moved across town. When we moved to Florida, it was like starting over, except for periodic visits from family to keep that connection alive.

After I walked across the stage to get my high school diploma, the four years of bonds that I built were broken and discarded. At 19, I joined the Army and left Florida behind, too, once I left for basic training. I spent my entire enlistment overseas, and trips home were infrequent. Since my neighborhood friends were away at college, they, too, became artifacts of a different time.

The first person who spanned multiple stages of my life was my friend from the Army who looked out for me when I arrived in Germany. She was pregnant when I arrived, and when she had her daughter, I became a de facto godfather and uncle. She left the Army and returned home before I did, but after my enlistment ended and I returned to Florida, I would visit her and her family periodically.

For the few years I spent in Florida after the Army, I started another life as my professional career began. I was part of a group of young, single professionals, and we became friends and spent time together outside of work, too. There were friendships, community, and dating, but I set those aside when I took the opportunity to leave the heat behind and move to Colorado.

Colorado was another opportunity to start over. I didn’t know anyone, but my friend from the Army became a flight attendant, and Denver was a hub for her airline. We were still in contact, and when she had a layover in Denver, we were able to see each other. I still occasionally visited her family and also joined them on a trip to China.

Eventually, though, even that relationship started to fade. She would get married, and so would I, and I was grateful to have her at my wedding before our lives went in different directions.

After my son was born, I felt like things might be settling down. I had a group of friends who were married and starting families, and we developed solid friendships as the kids grew up together. For a few years, especially with one of the families, it felt like the kind of lifelong bond that I have seen others have. But a job offer across the country pulled us from that life and dropped us into a new one where we knew no one and had to start over.

Leaving our friends this time was tough, both because of the connection we created and because we were alone and isolated when my son began having seizures. For a few years, every relationship was transitory. Doctors, nurses, and staff were the most consistent people in our lives. My son struggled to maintain regular attendance at school, which left him as a constant outsider as the other children formed bonds. He longed for his friend in Colorado, the last stable friendship he had. We were lucky for a few years to travel back to Colorado and spend time with them, but it wasn’t the same.

Even after he was more stable, his health and the constant appointments made his attendance spotty, further impeding his ability to form friendships. It seems as if just when we would find a sense of routine and normalcy, the universe would use its cosmic hand to shake things up.

The pandemic hit and separated the world. The move to an online school, separate from the public school his friends attended, created more distance. Finally, as the world opened up and we found a school we believed was right for him, we left the city for the suburbs, and those tenuous relationships we struggled to maintain eventually faded.

In some ways, this latest iteration of our life feels settled. The teachers and community at my son’s school provide structure and consistency, which helps form strong relationships. However, on a personal level, at a smaller scale, it feels temporary.

Transitory.

The people I see every weekend at tennis disappear when the courts close until we pick it back up in the spring. We see similar faces every summer during baseball season, but only during the games and never beyond the playoffs, while most of the players attend the same school and have a year-long connection. It’s wonderful to have those circles to return to, but they are scattered rings rather than connected links in a chain.

More and more, it feels like those links close as they fall off the chain, preventing them from ever being reattached. My son is done with baseball, forever removing that link from the chain. He’s had close classmates ghost him after leaving the school, damaging those links beyond repair. His best friend from the past two years is transferring to a public school, so they won’t see each other every day, which leaves that important link hanging precariously close to being disconnected.

But maybe the goal isn’t to build one long, unbroken chain.

Maybe what matters is the ability to keep adding new links — to connect with the people who come into our lives when they do, to hold onto them for as long as we can, and to be grateful for each link while it’s there.

My son already knows how to do that. He connects deeply, he feels the hurt when a link breaks, and then he finds a way to add new ones. In his own way, he’s building resilience — and showing me what it looks like to keep building a life, one link at a time.

Lucky Penny

We’ve been spending some time in Chattanooga to support our goddaughter as she recovers from surgery.

My wife and I have been taking turns spending time with our goddaughter at the hospital, and her grandparents have been extremely kind, bringing our son on various adventures to the aquarium, shopping, and restaurants.

One afternoon, her grandparents were at the hospital so my wife, son, and I decided to explore downtown and find a fun activity. We parked the car and stepped into downtown Chattanooga.

We lived in downtown Philadelphia for years, so when I use the word “downtown”, it’s technically true. However, it’s like coming from Colorado and hearing people on the East Coast use the word “mountain” to describe the adorable hills they ski down.

But downtown Chattanooga checked a lot of boxes. It had a combination of southern eateries and national chains, obscure shops and traditional retailers, and a blending of locals and tourists on the sidewalks.

We parked the car in a lot and stepped onto the sidewalk, adding ourselves to the mix. We had made it half a block before we saw another feature that Chattanooga had in common with other city centers.

As we passed a storefront, we saw a person in need asking if we had any change we could spare. I awkwardly felt in my pockets and found nothing. I apologized and he nodded the way you would expect a person who has been told the same thing hundreds of times a day would do and we continued down the sidewalk.

After a few more steps, my son stopped and turned back to the man. I watched as my son reached into his pocket and handed something to the man. I didn’t see what my son said, but I did hear the man say, “Thank you, but I can’t take your lucky penny.”

My son held his hand up in the universal “I’m not taking it back; it’s yours now” gesture and stepped back. The man looked at me and then back at my son, a small but genuine smile breaking through the weariness on his face.  “Thank you,” he said again, softer this time.

My gaze shifted to my wife who was nearly in tears. I felt the same way.

As parents, we often look for signs that we’re making the right choices for our children. We want them to have opportunities to be successful and to grow up to be kind, caring individuals. We want them to have better than we did and be better than we were. But we don’t always get that validation, especially when we’re navigating the challenges that come along with their unique needs.

I spend more time assuming that I am making the wrong choices than acknowledging the signs that my son is on the right path. I worry that my trauma will prevent me from being who I need to be for him or that my insecurities will be passed down to him, like my brown hair or love for video games.

Then there are moments like this. Moments that force me to stop. Moments that open my eyes. Moments that show me who he is.

We continued up the block until we found a place to sit. My wife dug into her purse and found a little cash. She gave it to our son, and I followed him up the block to where the man was still seated. My son handed him the folded-up bill and, in return, received a thank you and a handshake. I nodded to the man when he looked at me, and he gave me a look of deep appreciation.

Parenting is a journey filled with doubt, but also these small, brilliant flashes of clarity. Watching my son that day, I saw the kind of person he is becoming. And for a moment, all the worry faded, replaced by gratitude—because if nothing else, he is growing into someone who leads with his heart.

Thankful and Grateful

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States.

While we aren’t the only country that celebrates Thanksgiving, the holiday is widely celebrated in the United States as a time of gratitude and togetherness.

In our household, we have a nightly routine that has evolved over the years. It includes reflecting on something we are grateful for. Even if we are too tired to do the full routine, we never skip our “grateful for.”

That led me to wonder about Thanksgiving being a day about gratitude and the difference between being thankful and grateful. According to the vast library of truth that is the internet, gratitude encompasses both being thankful and being grateful, but even though the terms thankful and grateful are often used interchangeably, they have subtle differences in meaning and emotional nuance:

Thankful

Definition: Being aware of and expressing appreciation for something good that has happened or for a specific benefit received. Thankful is usually tied to a specific moment or event (short-term and outward-focused).
Focus: Often more situational and reactive; tied to specific actions, events, or gestures.
Example:
“I’m thankful for the gift you gave me.”
“She felt thankful for the sunny weather during her picnic.”

Grateful

Definition: A deeper sense of appreciation and acknowledgment, often tied to an enduring or broader sense of thankfulness. Grateful reflects a more profound, ongoing state of appreciation (long-term and inward-focused).
Focus: Goes beyond immediate circumstances and often reflects a heartfelt acknowledgment of a relationship, life situation, or intrinsic value.
Example:
“I’m grateful for having a supportive family.”
“He felt grateful for the lessons he learned from his challenges.”

With my newfound knowledge of the nuances of gratitude, I think about how it applies to the language I use in the context of my son’s epilepsy.

I am thankful that our son has access to medicine that helps reduce his seizures. I am thankful for the doctors and nurses who cared for him during his surgery. And I am thankful he has a friend who helped him catch up when our son returned to school.

I am grateful for the support of his friends and his school. I am grateful to live where he can access specialists and get the care he needs. I am grateful for the lessons I have learned from our son’s challenges.

I’m not sure it’s perfect, but in the end, regardless of the words we use, it’s the feeling that matters. Gratitude improves our overall well-being and strengthens relationships by fostering positive emotions, encouraging mutual appreciation, deepening connections, and helping us focus on the good in ourselves, others, and the world around us.

On a day intended to celebrate gratitude and togetherness, I think that’s what matters, whatever language we use.

Because this post mentions Thanksgiving, it’s also important to be mindful that its origins are tied to events that some Native Americans associate with colonization and the loss of land, culture, and lives. If you’d like to learn more, please read about the National Day of Morning, which is observed by many Native Americans on Thanksgiving and is a time to honor their ancestors and reflect on the historical and ongoing injustices faced by Indigenous peoples due to colonization.