There’s a table I set in my mind when I think about the people who have mattered most to me. Like one of those regular monthly dinner parties you have with your closest friends.
It’s a long table. The kind you’d need for a dinner party that’s grown comfortable with itself over the years — mismatched chairs, the clatter of cutlery punctuating bursts of laughter, and someone always getting up to find a corkscrew. The aroma of roasted garlic and baking bread lingers in the air, mingling with the earthy scent of worn wood beneath your hands.
I can still see the faces clearly: the friend who laughed loudest at his own jokes; the college roommate who remembered everything and could recite your stories back to you with better details than you could recall; the one who knew you before you’d figured yourself out. The quiet friend who always listened, her eyes reflecting stories she never told. Another guest, his rough hands wrapped around a glass, would tap a rhythm on the tabletop, the sound echoing softly between conversations.
As I entered my mid-sixties, I noticed empty chairs — subtle, quietly. Suddenly, it seemed, fewer people were at the table each year. The table gradually thins, and by your late sixties, you realize the guests have changed — not because of lost friendships, but because of the disquieting reality of outliving your friends.
Now that I am getting older, I’ve experienced that kind of loss, too often. There is now a constant reminder that there are no do-overs.
I’ve been sitting with this for a while now, and here’s what I’ve noticed: grieving a peer is different from grieving a parent, a grandparent, or someone much older than you. When someone older than you dies, there is grief, yes — often profound. But there is also something socially recognized, something we all have words for: They lived a good long life. It was their time. The rituals are in place, and the comforting phrases are ready.
But when you lose someone your age — someone who went to school when you did, grew up alongside you, shared similar life events, and worried about the same things — the world doesn’t quite have a script for it. It’s not just a person you’ve lost. It’s a witness. Your witness. That word — witness — is the one that keeps coming back to me as I experience more losses from my friend group.
A witness to your life is someone who was there for all of it. Not just for your highlight reel. For the ordinary Tuesday version of you. They knew about the bad break-ups, the job you left, the marriage that was hard for a while, the kid who worried you, and the version of yourself you’ve since grown out of. They held the unedited draft of your story, the way nobody else does.
When you lose a peer, you lose the holder of context. And quietly, without ceremony, a piece of your own history becomes unverifiable. There is no one left who remembers it quite the way you do. You are the last man standing.
Psychologists call this biographical erasure — the gradual loss of people who confirm our sense of who we have been. Research from the University of Texas found that people who experience high levels of peer loss later in life often report a destabilized sense of identity — not just loneliness, not just grief, but a narrative disorientation. Who am I if no one remembers who I was?
I think most of us in our sixties and seventies have felt some version of this without having a name for it. There’s a particular kind of grief that lives alongside the bigger grief, a quiet subtext that rarely gets spoken aloud. It is the grief of being left to carry the memories alone.
My Witness left my table just a few years ago. He understood this before I did and left me with just enough understanding of what I would feel. Just in time, too. The real tragedy of losing an old friend wasn’t just missing them — it was becoming the sole keeper of stories you’d both held. Stories that only made sense to the two of you. The inside joke that needed no setup. The reference that would have made them laugh. On repeat.
You don’t just grieve the person. You grieve the private language you built together, now kept in only one dictionary instead of two.
I’ve thought about that a lot in recent years, not just because of him, but because the table is now noticeably quieter. And sometimes, at odd moments — driving, waking early, or watching a hockey game — I reach for a phone call that can’t happen.
I’ve stopped telling myself that’s strange. That reaching for connection is not a pathology. It is love with nowhere left to go. And it deserves more than a stiff upper lip. It deserves to be spoken.
Here is what I’ve been trying to practice, imperfectly and inconsistently, in the years since the table started to shrink. The remaining seats at the table have learned to expect this from me and embrace it. Maybe some will resonate with you:
• Name the loss. Not just in private, but out loud, to someone. Grief without language gets stuck. The culture around us does a poor job of making space for the loss of peers — it doesn’t fit neatly into the recognized categories of bereavement. So we tend to absorb it silently, as though it were somehow less significant. It isn’t. Name it. Say the name.
• Let the stories out. The stories you were holding together don’t have to die with your witness. Tell them to someone younger. Tell them imperfectly. The friend who laughed loudest at his own jokes — tell someone who never met him what made him funny. This isn’t sentimentality. It’s how memory survives. It’s how a person who is gone continues to occupy the room.
• Tend the living table. After a loss, the instinct is often to close down, to brace for impact. The harder, more valuable thing is to look at who remains at the table and invest there — with more honesty, more time, and fewer postponed conversations. Not out of fear. Out of recognition that a witness is precious, and that the witnesses you still have are irreplaceable.
• Let yourself be witnessed, too. This is the one I find hardest. After enough loss, there’s a temptation to stop letting people in — to become the keeper of your own story rather than risk sharing it again. Resist that. Being known by someone is one of the great human experiences at any age. It doesn’t stop being worth the vulnerability at 70.
• Don’t wait for the right moment to reach out. The phone call you’ve been meaning to make, the visit you’ve been planning — it is not melodramatic to say that the table tries to teach us this lesson repeatedly, and we keep learning it too late. The right moment is now. It is always now.
The grief that comes with a shrinking table is real. I won’t paper it over with motivational advice or borrowed wisdom. Some days, it just hurts, and it should. A long friendship is one of the most extraordinary things two people can build together, and losing it is a genuine loss — not a checkpoint on the journey to acceptance, not a lesson to be extracted and then moved on from. A loss.
But here is what I also believe, having sat at enough tables at my age to know: the empty chairs still have presence. The people who sat in them left something behind in us, in the stories and memories we carry, and in the way they shaped how we love, argue, forgive, and laugh. The table shrinks. But what happened at that table never does.
I still set it in my mind. The long table. The mismatched chairs. The laughter. And I can still see every face.
And I’ll keep setting their places, for as long as I can remember them.
Next in The Long Losses: “Nobody’s Child — The Strange Grief of Outliving Your Parents”
What has the shrinking table looked like in your life? I’d love to hear from you in the comments — who sits at yours?
Thank you for writing so honestly and with vulnerability about grief. You've encouraged me to write again also. I wrote a bit about grief yesterday and reconnected with existing feelings that welled up from inside out.
Needed to read this today. Thank you.