I have. It was sudden and unexplained. We’d been close friends for years, she was close to my kids, we included her in holidays and family events, we’d taken trips together, etc. And then suddenly one day, with no particular incident in between, nothing changing that I knew of, I was written off. No word, no explanation—just BOOM. I was thunderstruck and hurt, and I did try to find out the cause and see if there was something I needed to make amends for, but I never got anywhere, and after a bit I gave up.
A while later I was describing this mystifying experience to other friends who didn’t know her, and one of them, one who’d been through plenty of therapy, said, “Sounds to me like someone identified you as part of a dysfunctional pattern.”
About twenty years later this former friend wrote me a letter of apology, saying that she had regretted her behavior but never knew how to set it right. But she never explained what had happened, what had caused the rift. And that’s all I ever knew.
One of the hardest things for me to accept has been the fact that some things just simply have no answers, or I can’t know the answers, which to me is the same thing. Once I got to that point with respect to God, the rest seemed easier.