The Shrinking Table

What we lose when we lose our witness.

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 monthly dinner parties you have with your closest friends.

It’s a long table. The kind you’d need for a dinner party that has grown comfortable with itself over the years — mismatched chairs, the clatter of cutlery punctuating bursts of laughter, someone always getting up to find a corkscrew. I can still see the faces clearly: the friend who laughed loudest at his own jokes, the college roommate who remembered everything, and the one who knew you before you’d figured yourself out.

As I entered my mid-sixties, I noticed the empty chairs, one by one, quietly. By your late sixties, you realize the guests have changed — not because of lost friendships, but because of the disquieting reality of outliving your peers.

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Grieving a peer is different from grieving a parent or someone older. When someone older dies, the culture has words for it: they lived a good long life. The rituals are in place.

But when you lose someone your age — someone who went to school when you did, worried about the same things and shared the same decades — the world doesn’t quite have a script for it. It’s not just a person you’ve lost. It’s a witness.

A witness to your life is someone who was there for all of it, not just the highlight reel. The ordinary Tuesday version of you. The bad break-ups, the job you left, and the version of yourself you’ve since grown out of. They held the unedited draft of your story in a way no one else does.

When you lose a peer, you lose the keeper of context. Quietly, without ceremony, a piece of your history becomes unverifiable. Psychologists call this biographical erasure — the gradual loss of people who confirm our sense of who we have been.

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My Witness left my table a few years ago. He understood what I would feel before I did and left me with just enough of that understanding, just in time.

The real tragedy of losing an old friend wasn’t just missing him. It was becoming the sole keeper of the stories we’d both held. The inside joke that needed no setup. The reference that would have made him 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.

Sometimes, at odd moments — driving, waking early, watching a hockey game — I reach for a phone call that can’t happen. I’ve stopped telling myself it’s strange. That reaching isn’t a pathology. It is love with nowhere left to go. And it deserves more than a stiff upper lip. It deserves to be spoken.

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Here is what I’ve been trying, imperfectly, to practise in the years since the table started to shrink.

Name the loss not just in private — out loud, to someone. Grief without a voice gets stuck. The culture does a poor job of making space for the loss of peers. Name it.

Let the stories out. The stories you were holding together don’t have to die with your witness. Tell them to someone younger, imperfectly. This isn’t sentimentality. It’s how memory endures.

Tend the living table. Look at who remains and invest there — with more honesty, more time, and fewer postponed conversations. A witness is precious, and the witnesses you still have are irreplaceable.

Don’t wait. The phone call you’ve been meaning to make, the visit you’ve been planning. The table keeps teaching us this. We keep learning it too late. The right moment is now. It always is.

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The grief that comes with a shrinking table is real. I won’t paper it over. Some days, it just hurts, and it should. A long friendship is one of the most extraordinary things two people can build, and losing it is a genuine loss — not a checkpoint on the journey to acceptance, not a lesson to be extracted and then set aside. A loss.

But here is what I also believe, having sat at enough tables to know: the empty chairs still have presence. The people who sat in them left something behind — in the stories we carry and in the way they shaped how we love, argue, forgive, and laugh. The table shrinks, but what happened there 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 as long as I remember them.

The full version of The Shrinking Table — with the complete research, a deeper personal narrative, and the full Long Losses series — is available on Substack at gregpallone.substack.com: