Hello @contentandwell and all on this discussion thread. I don't have a whole lot to add to this discussion as I am a Freethinker and not a spiritual person. However, I did want to add one aspect to the friendship discussion above.

As some of you may know my wife battled brain cancer for 14+ years. It was an intensely isolating experience. For my wife, for our grown children, and for me. Luckily one of our daughter's friends gave her some early advice. She had lost her mom to cancer just a year or so before and she said this "you will be shocked by who you DO NOT hear from and you will be just as shocked by who you DO hear from." I was thankful for this advice, which rang very true. Had someone asked me ahead of time to guess who would stick with us and who would ghost on us I would have been completely, totally wrong!

We were lucky to each have one friend, and not who we would have expected, hang with us and provide wonderful support from afar for the years of our journey. Most family and almost every friend, some of more than 40 years, chose to ghost on us -- until she died when of course they all wanted to tell me how much they cared...

I came to appreciate the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

The only advice I can find from our experience is you don't know who your true friends will be until you are in the caldron.

Peace & Strength

Thank you for posting that @IndianaScott even though it made me sad. I love that MLK quote.

@pdilly and @IndianaScott Yes, that was a great quote! Teresa

Sorry I made you sad @pdilly It wasn't my intention. Like I said -- I stayed out of this thread for a reason. I tend to focus too much on the realties of my years of experiences as a caregiver.

Glad to hear you liked the MLK quote. He was an eloquent, strong, and amazing man for sure!

Peace & Strength

@IndianaScott , no apology necessary. It just made me sad to think of so many abandoning your family at a time when the need for support was so great.

@IndianaScott Scott, your post is so true, we never really know. I even had one of my water aerobic instructors who lives in a totally different town to volunteer to do errands for me or to help clean my house! I will always have a special place in my heart for her, she is such a dear and a true Christian. The friend who supplied the most support lives across the country in SF but as a breast cancer survivor she understood what I was going through. Of course she was not HERE but even so having her to "talk" to was great.
JK