This is Getting Old by Susan Moon

damage. He got me laughing, and together we put the paper back in the paper bags, and together we put it out to be recycled.

    Friends see each other through changes. For years I’ve been taking a walk with a friend every Thursday morning. When we were young single mothers, we used to take our children skiing together. We also hiked together. Later, on our weekly walks, we took a trail in the hills behind Berkeley. The walks became shorter when we stopped doing the very steep part at the top because of my knees. The next change was to a gentler but still sloping walk in a pretty park near her office—well, actually it’s a cemetery, but we don’t lie down in it. Lately my friend has been having trouble with her hip, and so we have further adjusted our walk, staying on level ground, in the early morning streets of our neighborhood. On our last walking date, she arrived at the appointed time to pick me up, but she had just done something to her back while getting into the car, and so for our walk time she lay on her back on my living room floor and I brought her a cold pack from the fridge. I sat in the rocking chair beside her, and we talked until she had to drive to work.
    I’m noticing that when someone you love needs help, it feels good to give it. In order to be “a refuge for myself and others,”as Shantideva says, I try to “make the interchange of ‘I’ and ‘other,’” to remember that helping a friend is not so different from receiving help from a friend, and this gives me confidence that my friends are glad to help me when I need them. There are plenty of opportunities going both directions.
    The older you get, the more your friends have health problems. A close friend was seriously ill a couple of years ago with a rare form of viral pneumonia. Many years before, soon after I moved to California, she had been the one to introduce me to the high country of Yosemite. When I got short of breath hiking up the trail behind her, in air thinner than I’d ever breathed before, she encouraged me: slow and steady wins the race, she said. She told me to breathe from deep in my belly, with my diaphragm.
    When she got sick, I sat with her often during her prolonged hospital stay. These hours had not been planned for in my busy schedule, and yet there was time to be with her. It was not a problem. Wholeheartedness led the way, and it felt good not to question, not to hedge, not to hold back. It was my turn to encourage her to breathe.
    I know a woman in her seventies who has formed what she calls a “pod” with a few old and trusted friends. They have made a pact to go to each other when the need arises, to “be there for each other.” She says this might mean sitting by a bedside, advocating in the hospital, or holding hands when something terrible happens. It might even mean helping each other die. It might mean saying, “The state in which I see you now is what you always told me you didn’t want.”
    I’ve been thinking about it. You could make such an agreement explicit, like a wedding vow.
If you need me, I will do everything in my power to come to you. If I need you, I will expect the same of you
. You could say it out loud, or you could even write up a document.
    And even without saying anything, I’m in a sort of pod with my friends.
    Old friendships are a benefit of getting old, but old friends also die. It’s lonely when you’re very old and your close friends are gone. This was impressed upon me when I visited my grandmother’s beloved lifetime friend, “Aunt Dorothy,” several years after my grandmother’s death. She was about ninety, and tiny, sitting up in her bed at home, like a little hill in the bedclothes, a small bump of life sticking up above the plain, all her friends gone. She told me she missed my grandmother every single day of her life. She said she didn’t want to be alive any more now