Boon Companions

Five of the six of us playing in my Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign got together last night for the first time in a long time; work demands kept the other away, tragically.

It turns out that a few of us had very rough weeks leading up to Saturday. I found out that a co-worker and friend from Games Workshop had passed away suddenly at 49. Another friend discovered he has a six-week window to move his aging mother to a different facility due to nursing changes where she is. And a third discovered a long-time friend had been diagnosed with prostate cancer which had metastasized into their lymph nodes, and did not have long to live.

Now, we are not the kind of group that ever worries about ticking enough boxes on the societal manliness checklist, but some of those stereotypes exist for a reason. One of them is "men are reluctant to talk about how they feel," and sometimes, maybe even a lot of times, that applies to us. We do not typically indulge in a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments and the like, but last night, we all felt compelled to unburden ourselves a little.

We talked about how ill-equipped we feel in dealing with peer mortality. About the guilt and shame of finding an unsent email wishing a departed friend a happy birthday. Looking at the challenges our aging parents face (or that we face on their behalf) and wondering what it will be like for us. As one of us opined, "the time of gathering on the regular for weddings is largely past us now; gathering for funerals is probably more likely."

One of us had brought a luxurious bottle of whiskey (thank you!), saying that it, like us, was Very Rare, and improving with age, as we hope to. And the three of us who partake of liquor did so, several times, toasting the importance of friends, present, absent, and departed. 

The term boon companion refers to a close friend one enjoys spending time with. Boon derives from the French "bon" which in turn comes to us from the Latin "bonus," all of which means "good", but originally refers to drinking companions. I have long supported the wisdom of "in vino veritas" so this makes all the sense in the world to me, and if it is offputting at all to our teetotalling brethren, they give no indication of it.

So we drank, and we remembered and we lamented and we encouraged each other that we are all doing the best that we can. Eventually, our group of real friends got back to the business of using dice and imagination and fake newspaper articles from the mid-1920s to tell a collective story about a group of imaginary friends trying to avenge a dead colleague by combatting the death cults who had assassinated him. And it was good. Maybe even great.

Yes, I suppose it is kind of silly thing for a group of grown-ass men to do, but we don't care. It scratches a lot of itches like our need for creativity, imagination, deductive reasoning, and tactical thinking. But most importantly, it puts us in the same space, with an opportunity to share food and drink as well as fun, and to simply relate to one another as humans who care for each other, but who may not always find that easy to articulate. 

Earlier this same, terrible week, I had read on CNN about "why most men don't have enough close friends." The challenges of finding people you can relate to in a fast-paced and ever-changing world, and how this turns out to be critical for our long-term survival.

“What (men) are at risk of losing is this sense of not being alone in the world or not being alone in their experience,” Sileo said. Research has shown “disclosure of emotional distress improved (men’s) emotional well-being, increased feelings of being understood and resulted in less reported loneliness,” he added.

Some of those Saturday night conversations were not easy, but in the end, I can't help but feel we fought off something even more dangerous than the Cult of the Bloody Tongue, and perhaps more insidious than the Brotherhood of the Black Pharoah.

If you are reading this, there is a very good chance that I already or at least would likely call you a friend. And if we have not been in contact for longer than you might like, I am sorry for that, and hope that we reconnect before too long.

But for the friends in my most immediate circles, the ones I see around the gaming table or at church or on my monitor as we explore the jungles of Chult from three different time zones, I hope I have made it clear how much I appreciate our relationship, and how grateful I am for our friendship.

May none of our friends ever have to speculate as to whether or not they are valued- please know that you are.