It was over, VJ Day. Japan had surrendered. There were people dancing in the street and singing songs in the park. I was 10 years old and running around with my friends, having a grand time celebrating, when I heard a car screech to a halt behind me. I turned around to be devastated – my dog, running behind us, had been run over by a car. Being an only child and spending a lot of time on our farm with no one else around, my dog Patsy, was my best and loyalist friend. In an instant my happiness had been torn from me.

She writhing in pain as I carried her broken and smashed body to my house a block away. She was beyond repair and died in my arms before I arrived home. I was crying all the way, I could feel her pain. When I reached home, my mother and father were as overwhelmed with emotion as I was. We cried together. Patsy was their second child. She had been with us since before I could remember – she was my sister.

My mother asked me when she died. I told her a few minutes before I got her home. Then she said something I never forgot, “We can be happy it was fast and she didn’t have to suffer long.” Only a mother could bring joy to such a situation. It was a lesson that was filed away in the back of my brain, and I thought forgotten.

Seventy years later, unfortunately, I had cause to remember it. My wife was fighting cancer. She reached the stage where she collapsed one morning. The 911 respondents admitted her to the hospital and the doctors told her, and the family, that there was nothing more they could do, except keep her alive hooked up to machines. She said, “No more treatments, let me go. I’m ready.”

We did as she wished. The doctors unplugged the machines. It took her three hours to die, as the family stood at her bedside, and I sat next to the bed, holding her hand.

I could hear my mother’s words from the past, and they gave me comfort in my world of loss. I was truly thankful when the machine finally flat-lined, and I kissed my wife goodbye on the forehead, that after a year of struggling, she was no longer in pain.

I planed a trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, to visit some of the friends I left behind when I moved back to California after living in Washington for 23 years. I was asked, “Why are you doing that?”

My off-the-cuff answer was, “I don’t know, I just want to see them again.”

Their reply was, “They are not part of your life anymore, why spend the money and the time to go back?”

I just said, “Because I want to.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

When I arrived in Port Ludlow, where I had spent those 23 years I saw 13 different people and still missed some. I only had five days. One day I drove down to the harbor where I had stored my kayak and ate my lunch. By myself, sitting on a bench, looking out at the placid water, my mind wandered onto the question. Why am I here? This isn’t my world any more.

Why would I buy a plane ticket to Seattle, rent a car, and drive over here? Why would I make such an effort to see people that are no longer a part of my active life? I looked out at the bay and told it, I do it because they are my friends. Then the big question, what is a friend?

In my world, (and I realize I am speaking only for my world), a friend is someone that I trust, admire, enjoy being with, and I consider to be a “good” person, (whatever that means). I have friends I have known for 65 years, and I have friends that I only had contact with for a few days. As I sat looking out over the harbor I realized I had over a hundred people I called friends and wondered if they considered me one of their friends. I hoped they did, but I still hadn’t answered the question of why I was here.

It suddenly became crystal clear. I needed them. They reminded me of how good my life was, and still is, because of what they taught me during some segment of my life. They and all the other “friends” helped to guide me on the path I have taken in life that has made me who I am today and who I will become tomorrow.

My visiting is a small way of saying “Thank you for being my friend”. There are a number of my friends that have left us and are no longer available to visit with. I talk to them when I am walking late at night. I sit on a bench to absorb the beauty of the sky over my head, and I thank my invisible friends for sharing their new home with me and for reminding me that possibilities are as unlimited as the Universe.

It is then that I realize that all my friends are still a significant part of who I am.