COMMENTARY: A Friend Who Made Me Feel Like a Boy Again

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Theodore Roosevelt explained his decision to lead a hunting expedition to Africa after leaving the White House by saying, “It’s my last chance to be a boy again.” That phrase returned to me when I learned, in a week of losses around the world, of the loss of one […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Theodore Roosevelt explained his decision to lead a hunting expedition to Africa after leaving the White House by saying, “It’s my last chance to be a boy again.”

That phrase returned to me when I learned, in a week of losses around the world, of the loss of one of my closest friends. You may not have known Don Healey but, if you are fortunate, you have had friends like him, for with him it was easy to be a boy again.


Don Healey had a distinguished career in the CIA where he served as station head in Tokyo and Rome. His colleagues can tell you how much he did for his country, and his wife Maureen and their children and grandchildren can tell you how much he did for his family. I can only tell you how much he did for his friends.

We live, after all, in a highly mobile world in which friendship seems elusive and seminars are held on whether men and women forge friendships in the same way. Some even claim that a shadow of suspicion falls across the possibility of friendship between members of the same sex.

Everybody, however, longs for a good friend. For many it is a distant Camelot shrouded in the mists of emotional mischance. In a highly mobile society many lack the stable ground friendship demands. They settle for acquaintances, who do not demand the investment of self that true friends do and do not cost us as much when we are separated from them by time or by chance.

Are the famous characters on the sit-com “Friends,” now seen in reruns, really friends, or fictitious pseudo-citizens of that lesser Camelot in which hurts never last long and everything is forgiven and wrapped up in half an hour?

In other languages, the word friend derives from the Latin amare, as in the French mon ami, meaning one who loves. Friends know how to love each other, as any happy husband and wife can tell you. They know how to live at close range without violating the borders of trust and respect that are the conditions for friendship.

The root of the word friend, like that of freedom, comes from an old German word that means “to make a safe place for your beloved.” Friends make us feel safe in their presence. They are not just positioning us to take advantage of us later on. They give the gift of themselves freely; they never send an emotional bill or try to collect from us later.

Don Healey grasped all this intuitively. But if you were ever tempted to thank him for the time he had taken, the prayers he had said, the tough moments in which he stood by you, he would shake his head and laugh and say, in effect, that he couldn’t remember doing anything special.


That he could not remember all he did for others explains the nature of friendship itself. Real friends cannot remember what they do for us because, whether it is sitting with us in a hospital waiting room, bringing a meal at a time of need, or giving us courage when our supply is low, they are not thinking of themselves.

They give themselves not to make a good impression or to receive our praise but simply give to the needs of others with no regard for their own.

That, of course, is why at the Last Judgment the people who are saved are so surprised. When, they ask, did we see you hungry, or visit you in prison, or give you water in your thirst? They are saved not because they were solemnly righteous and thought religiously well of themselves in life but because they didn’t think about themselves at all.

Don Healey brought the gift of friendship into life and he gave it away without thinking about himself or worrying that his supply might run out. Entering the eternal was nothing new for him because he had tapped into its spring and shared it with others every day.

That’s why I remembered Teddy Roosevelt’s words about a chance to be a boy again. Don Healey’s ease with the eternal gave him the magic to make time fall away along with the wrinkles, scars and regrets we all accumulate in a lifetime. Knowing Don gave me, as real friends do for all of us, the chance to be a boy again.

MO/RB END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)


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