Free I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch

no-one-gets-out-of-here-alive cancers. I voraciously consume the obits, tallying what takes out whom, at what speed and what the symptoms are, and I know that if Steve Jobs couldn’t beat this one, nobody can.
    Every time I pick up the phone, someone’s having a health crisis. In the past, when friends have died it’s seemed like the exception, not the rule, but now all bets are off. There was the cruel swiftness with which AIDS dispatched my gay friends in the eighties and then there was Fernando’s overdose at thirty-nine; the actress who was murdered, leaving her young daughter motherless; the neighbor who’d dropped dead from a brainaneurysm on his daily run. Come to think of it, he’d just turned fifty. Now every passing year brings news of a friend’s decline or demise. Last month brought a wave of suicides.
    “Have you heard about Daniella’s husband? He went off his meds and drove off a cliff. He left a note saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
    “Two young children. Tragic.”
    “Did you know the comedy writer, Steven Something-Jewish?”
    “Steven Something-Jewish, oh yeah, it was drugs and alcohol, right?”
    “It wasn’t career related, right, wasn’t he always working?”
    “Yes!”
    “Tragic.”
    “Have you heard about . . .”
    “Yes. Tragic!”
    Deena’s brain tumor, Yulissa’s back surgery and Curtis’s irregular heartbeat.
    “Heart? Heart is good. Just look at Dick Cheney.”
    If I’m not filling out bring-them-a-meal requests, I’m dropping off medication, driving a friend to get an MRI, making an emergency sour cream run or walking someone’s dog. People are starting to brag about their low cholesterol levels with the enthusiasm once reserved for sexual conquests. I hate that I get a joke with Boniva in the punchline.
    But the news about Robin hit especially hard. She was the person I’ve known the longest since moving to Los Angeles. It can be challenging to make long-lasting friendships after college, but Robin and I had stuck it out. I leaned on Robin like an older sisterin the early years of our acquaintance, when our five-year age difference seemed enormous, but over time, the gap had compressed and we’d become peers.
    When my sulky movie-star boyfriend disappeared overnight and changed his phone number, it was her idea to drive out to a crummy strip mall and chuck the keys to his apartment into the sewer. * She knew me well enough to know that having those keys in my possession would be dangerously tempting for me, though in retrospect, I’m sure he had changed his locks as well.
    Over the years there’d been times when I’d see that phone number and brace myself for the way her New Jersey nasal whine could inspire guilt in me. “Annnabeeeelle, it’s Roooobin. Where are you??” But we’d put in the time. My divorce, her career setbacks, my career setbacks, my new marriage, her new career, the birth of my son, her big breakups, her parents’ declining health. We’d been like sisters for two and a half decades and were heading into our third.
    Our friendship was tested when she turned fifty. She’d woken up convinced that she’d been cheated out of the attention she deserved having never been married, with no children to birthday party or bar mitzvah. She insisted her closest girlfriends accompany her to sample Syrahs in the Rhône Valley. When none of us could take the trip, she felt betrayed and abandoned. Now, facing this diagnosis, she’d taken me and the rest of her inner circle back.
    “No one will ever have sex with me again.”
    “No one’s having sex with you now. At least now you can attend your own group,” I said in an attempt at humor.
    After an award-winning career of producing stand-up comedy, Robin had gone back to school to become a therapist and had been working as a bereavement facilitator for oncology groups. She knew the landscape ahead of her: punishing rounds of chemo and if she was really, really lucky, she might get a year