I got my first writing job in college penning blog posts for a website about death — or rather, “embracing the end-of-life experience.” As a writer for an ambitious startup with the goal of eliminating the death taboo, I had the privilege of talking with countless people about losing loved ones, having near-death experiences, and caring for others on the verge of passing away. Before my first interview with someone who’d lost a parent, I was nervous that I’d become infected with their overwhelming grief or, worse, say the wrong thing and cause them to suffer more. That time and dozens thereafter, I found those who’d been bombarded by death had the easiest time appreciating life.
Most of our anxieties can be whittled down to a fear of death — from manic fixations with hot pilates to obsessively swiping for Tinder dates. But according to new research, it doesn’t have to be that way. For the study, published on June 1 in SAGE Journals, researchers compared the blog posts of terminally ill writers with passages by healthy participants who had the assignment of imagining they had mere months to live. They found those actually facing death used positive language more often than those with imaginary diagnoses.
Kurt Gray, who helped write the study, told The Guardian, “I imagine this is because they know things are getting more serious, and there’s some kind of acceptance and focusing on the positive because they know they don’t have a lot of time left.”
Anyone who’s suffered from a serious illness or watched a loved one wither away will likely find this unsurprising. With an approximate timeline, you have to make the most of what’s left. To be clear, it wasn’t that the terminally ill writers found their impending deaths to be wonderful news; rather, they learned to live in contentment more often than dread.
What’s perhaps more interesting is the idea of finding acceptance in the brief moments immediately preceding death. In 2014, New York EMT Matthew O’Reilly gave a TED Talk on this topic. As someone whose job involves walking patients through their dying moments — often unexpectedly — he did what anyone would do when asked, “Am I going to die?” As described in the lecture, at first, he lied, telling them they were going to be fine in the hopes of instilling calm in their final moments of life. Through trial and error, he realized telling the truth to be far more soothing for those who had no chance of survival.
Between this recent study and lived experiences, perhaps there’s a lesson for all of us in that, by treating ourselves to more kindness and honesty, we can make the most of our relatively brief lifespans.
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.