The Friends Who Won't Let You Die

Loving a Friend for a Lifetime with Alice Markowitz and Jeanne McDermott | 🎙️ Episode 10

I want to tell you something about what it felt like to sit in the room and witness nearly 50 years of friendship lived.

Jeanne’s living room in Massachusetts is the kind of space that tells you everything about a person before they say a word. Art everywhere. Plants. Objects that have clearly traveled. You could feel the life that had been lived in and around that house, the intention behind every corner of it. And Alice’s home, which I walked through beforehand (appropriately noticing all her friendship paintings), had the same quality. Two women who had spent decades building something around themselves that reflected who they actually are.

I had known Alice for years. She’s one of those people who has a generosity of spirit that you just want to be near, creative and eloquent and genuinely curious about everyone she meets. She hired me once off a cover letter about beets, which tells you almost everything. I had never met Jeanne. I only knew her through the pieces Alice had shared: that they been fixed up by a mutual friend, that they had lived in the same corner of the world for decades, that they now swam together and sang in a community chorus and saved each other seats in the back row.

I also knew that Jeanne had just given the eulogy for a friend she had known since she was ten years old.

What I didn’t know was how fun it would be. How much we’d laugh. How the whole thing would feel both reverent and delightfully silly at the same time, which is, I think, what the best friendships actually feel like from the inside.

Jeanne’s story about her childhood friend is deeply moving, and I don’t want to give too much away here. But I will say there is a moment in this conversation that felt almost like a Steel Magnolias scene to me, the way grief and love and laughter showed up in the same breath, the way the people we want beside us when things get hard are always, always the ones who can still make us laugh. Jeanne said something in that moment to Alice that has lingered with me.

We also talked openly about aging. Alice is 71 and she does not soften it: it is, as she puts it, just fucking shocking. We talked about the pull of the community chorus and the specific joy of singing badly with people you love. We talked about grace, which Alice distinguishes from forgiveness very carefully, as the art of letting people be who they are in your company and just rolling with it. We talked about tile floors and handwritten notes and the tiny rituals that hold a long friendship together.

I drove home feeling like they had restored something in me. Like I had been let in on a gift. It was something sacred to witness, as if I had been given a glimpse of what friendship looks like if you just keep showing up for each other across all the years and all the versions of yourselves.

I want to be that for someone. I want someone to be that for me.

I am sincerely hoping Jeanne invites me to her next round of charades and Alice lets me into the chorus “cult”. I would like to stay in the warmth of their friendship for as long as they’ll have me.

This episode comes with a lot of laughs, a little heartbreak, and so much wisdom about how to love your people well. It’s for anyone who has friends they’ve known throughout their life, people they love deeply and are also a little terrified of losing.

Meet my Friends, Alice and Jeanne 💛:

"Friendship is not an audition. Friendship doesn't need to last. It needs to satisfy both of the people at those moments." — Alice

Just Make a Bunch of Friends and Figure it Out

Alice & Jeanne’s Friend Picks:

• Alice: A community chorus. You don’t have to read music. You just have to show up and invite your friends.

  
  Also, anything by Anne Lamott, who I adore also. I just saw her on stage with Neal Allen at the Emerson Theater in Boston and can attest she is delightful in person as she is on the page. She, too, turns to her friends when she needs to keep the writing faith.)

• Jeanne: Charades! Or a handwritten note. She’s embracing in this in carrying on the legacy of her dear friend. Just find a card, write something true, and send it. Even if your handwriting is impossible to read. (Especially then.)

Join the campfire:

Is there a friend who has been with you through more than one version of yourself? Someone you're a little terrified of losing?

Tell me about them. Or forward this episode to that person right now, while you're thinking of them.

Leave a comment below, or come find us on Instagram @theyeahnoforsureshow.

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✱ We recorded this on a gray afternoon in Jeanne's living room, and at one point her husband Ted walked in while we were mid-conversation about friendships with men. He took it very well.