Lean on me

Dr. Kelley Mathia met Stella Reid in 1997 and quickly discovered they’d been shadowing each other’s lives for ages. They’d worn the same hairstyles, attended the same Spokane concerts, parties and cheerleading camps, and even owned matching strapless green metallic dresses in the ‘80s. But the biggest coincidence of all: The two 38-year-olds both deliver babies at Sacred Heart Medical Center, Mathia as an obstetrician and Reid as a labor and delivery nurse.

Mathia shared the warm, funny details of their frequent consults – on topics ranging from obstetrics to hair and makeup – in recent e-mails to The Spokesman-Review. Hers were among the nearly 100 responses we received to a request for tales of women’s friendships. Letters and e-mails poured into the paper, describing friendships lasting anywhere from seven years to 70 and sharing vivid memories of Pepto Pink bridesmaids dresses, wacky divorces and Nashville road trips.

These letters helped shed light on recent research that indicates that women’s friendships may not only help them endure stress, but even live longer. These letter-writers also pointed out the keys to creating lasting ties.

“These relationships don’t just happen overnight,” wrote Patsy Pinch. She named 11 women as friends. “They are cultivated throughout your lifetime through experiences shared such as sick children, flat tires, overheated engines on a 95-degree day with a carload of toddlers, wine and cheese parties, phone calls at midnight to relate tragic news, on and on and on.”

When Sharon Mather of Spokane described her best friend Judy, she wrote that they’ve been there for each other during life’s most wrenching moments.

“We have comforted one another when our aging parents needed us,” she wrote. “I have held her hand when her doctor told her he could not hear the fetal heart tones of the baby she carried. She was there for me the evening I called her from Holy Family’s emergency room about my mom.”

These letter-writers described the difficulties their friendships had seen them through – diagnoses of multiple sclerosis or cancer, divorces from abusive or adulterous husbands, deaths of well-loved spouses, fears over a child’s illness or regrettable choices, all the losses and fears and defeats that life can bring.

But many more of them wrote of delight and humor.

“I remember when she was Washington State Dairy Princess, and I was Miss Deer Park and how we BACKCOMBED our hair!” wrote Deer Park teacher Melinda Reynolds. She met her best friend Pam Ashford in a junior high art class in 1961. Their friendship survived high school, college and miserable starter marriages. Yet their shared humor shines through.

“I value and respect her with all my heart,” Reynolds wrote. “She is part of me, my sanity, my rock and my giggle buddy.”

Sue Chapin of Spokane met Connie Wennhold at Camp Sweyolakan, the Camp Fire camp on Lake Coeur d’Alene when they were girls. They slept in tree houses next to each other.

They became roommates at Washington State University, so close that Wennhold’s parents practically adopted Chapin. “When Connie got a lecture from her parents,” Chapin wrote, “they gave me the same one, too, assuming if she needed it so did I. When her mom knitted one sweater, she knitted a second identical one in my size, too.”

Over the years they’ve played practical jokes on one another, talked each other through unsuitable boyfriends and been in each other’s weddings. Wennhold now lives in Minden, Nev., but they still talk regularly. And ever since 1974, their freshman year at WSU, they’ve passed a rubber critter they call “the spider” back and forth.

“We bought it at Fonk’s,” Chapin said, “and it has been found in an assortment of places, my underwear drawer, her coat pocket, wrapped as a Christmas gift and even delivered by a florist in a long-stemmed rose box.”

As for the busy obstetrics friends, Mathia and Reid, last month they sang and danced together in a hospital fund-raiser called the Heart Follies at the Spokane Opera House. “We are absolutely crazy and wild and have a blast with the other performers from the hospital,” Mathia said. “We lead the pack going out socially after practices and feed off each other’s energy.”

Researchers have found that while stress may trigger a “fight or flight” impulse in men, it’s more likely to spark a “tend and befriend” mechanism in women.

“Social support is especially sought out by women in response to stress,” University of California-Los Angeles professor Shelley Taylor has said. She’s the author of “The Tending Instinct” (Holt.) “The literature suggests that women are getting much of their social support from a few female relatives with whom they’re close and a few close friends.”

She led a UCLA study in published in 2000 that examined women’s response to stress. She believes the hormone oxytocin may play a role in helping to calm women. It may be released when they tend their children and gather with other women.

This research may help explain why women on average outlive men by six to seven years, Taylor said.

Says Mathia, the obstetrician, “If I could prescribe the type of deep friendship I have with Stella for my patients, I really believe it would improve their long-term health just as much as any preventive methods I do prescribe.”

Jeanne Givens, a teacher at the tribal school in DeSmet, Idaho, describes how she often “downloads” on her friend Tracie Mantia Cooper of Hayden Lake, Idaho. But the friendship goes both ways.

“I cheer her wins,” Givens wrote, “suffer her losses and remind her how many admiring men glanced her way as she walked by.”

Certainly many women have the capacity for long-lasting friendships. One of the most intriguing has to be that of Sylvia Miller and Nancy Vocature, two 57-year-old Spokane women who were born on the same day, Oct. 25, 1948, at Deaconess Hospital in Spokane.

“When I tell the story of my friendship with Sylvia, people think I’m making it up,” Vocature wrote. “We share parallel lives filled with mystifying coincidences.”

Their mothers, Melba Barton and Mabel Baker, shared a hospital room. The two women became friends and brought their daughters together to celebrate their birthdays with identical gifts and matching outfits.

Both women married in the spring of 1970 and discovered their new husbands shared an identical birthday — May 18. Each had three children, failed marriages and second weddings. Their new husbands liked scuba diving, so separately, each woman became a certified diver.

“We have continued to celebrate every birthday together, continued to love and support each other, continued to laugh and cry in the sunshine and shadow of 57 years of living,” Vocature wrote. “If I had tried to invent a story of two heart-sisters, I could never have imagined such a wonderful friendship.”

Many described long-distance friendships, such as one between Diana J. Legun of Olympia and Darlene Mason of Spokane who spent years abroad. “Letters were the beads on the necklace cord,” Legun wrote.

Several women wrote to describe the deep satisfaction long friendships have brought to their senior years.

Julie Farmer met Dorothy Hood when they were both students at Marycliff High School in Spokane in 1955. They both traveled after graduation to LaCrosse, Wis., to enter a convent. Farmer saved money by traveling in the uniform of an aspirant.

After she changed her mind, she returned home wearing Hood’s street clothes. And she’s continued to write to her friend, a Franciscan Sister of the Eucharist now living in Bridal Veil, Ore., for the last 46 years.

“We write our feelings, good and bad, and her spirituality has been a comfort to me when my dad died, also when I came to live in senior housing, and even my ‘empty-nest’ feelings for my six kids,” Farmer wrote.

Kaye Kerns of Spokane cherishes her friend Fay Baxter, now living in California.

“Years have passed, memories linger on and keep us close,” she wrote. “We are both widows and miss each other so much since we are apart. Our sons keep us supplied with phone cards and we talk daily.”

And then there’s Maxine Sullivan and Mary Shiffer, who met when they were 8 and 9 in Portland. This summer they celebrated 50 years of friendship with a road trip through Tennessee they called “The Thelma and Louise Tour.”

They hit the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and the Jack Daniel’s Distillery in Lynchburg.

Along the way, they listened to everybody from Elvis to Patsy Cline to Joan Baez singing Civil War songs, as well as Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” They dubbed the music “The Thelma and Louise Tour soundtrack.”

Sullivan of Post Falls sums it up like this: “We understand each other’s eccentricities, we came ‘from there’ together, and it has forged a bond that I cannot ever imagine breaking. As Mary puts it, ‘We are the sisters we wish we had!’ “

Do these women live longer? It’s hard to imagine their friendships haven’t increased their longevity. They write of ties spun with conversational gold, whether it’s during daily long-distance phone calls, weekly bike trips or annual Hawaii vacations.

Many are certain their friends keep them young.

“Spending time with Susie is like a counseling session, a venting session and a long show of good stand-up comedy all rolled into one,” wrote Nancy Breckenridge of her friend Susie Amini. The two women met 39 years ago in the fourth grade.

Breckinridge asked, “Who wouldn’t live longer with a frequent dose of such therapeutic luxury in their lives?”

Oldest and youngest friendship stories

Summer 1932, I was a 6-year-old living with my parents, paternal aunt and grandmother on her Southwestern Iowa farm.

Imagine the loneliness of an only child in a household of stern old-world Germans, with an occasional hired man to break the monotony, whose only playmates were the barn kittens and the working collie.

My bleak life changed forever the day Dad took me with him in the ‘29 Chevy pickup to Mr. Ring’s farm. When Mr. Ring saw me, he called for his granddaughter. To my great joy, out of the house bounded a petite, sandy-haired, freckle-face girl just my age: Helen.

A towering oak tree outside the kitchen door provided shade on a hot, humid day and the perfect branch for a rope and board swing. It was on that day that Helen and I bonded as we took turns pumping the swing to its heights. We planned how I’d introduce her to my friends Lorraine and Wanda in second grade; how we’d sit on the same bench when we ate our lunch; how we’d cross our fingers hoping our classroom desks would be close, in spite of the fact I was much bigger and taller.

Helen and I were best friends through high school and into our young adult years. We lived together in an apartment, road the same streetcar to work in Omaha and dated brothers in World War II.

We were maid of honor at each other’s wedding; each had three children; each moved several times due to husband’s occupation and kept in touch only at Christmas.

How could we have let such a meaningful relationship to wither?

When we met again at our 50th class reunion in 1993, we vowed we’d make up for lost time. Since then, Helen and I frequently talk on the phone, she from the Midwest, I from the Northwest, sharing life and laughter as we did those many years ago. In the winters we meet in Arizona where, with husbands, we eat simple meals, play hours of pinochle, talk about the grandkids and we laugh a whole lot.

Lois Klopping Lawson of Colville, writing about her friend Helen Ring Tamisiea who lives in Overland Park, Kansas.

My best friend Anna and I met a few months before kindergarten in Spokane when her family moved in a few houses down the street from mine. Instantly best friends, we started the first day of kindergarten holding hands and doing everything together.

This continued throughout school as we attended Wilson Elementary, Sacajawea Middle School and Lewis and Clark High School. By LC, it became common knowledge that if you wanted to locate one of us, you could just as easily search for the other.

Of course we had other friends but I have to admit it would have been challenging to be with just the two of us together. Many a boyfriend suffered through this and we seem to have an intoxicating effect on each other.

Our high school graduation party was combined, and guests were able to sign a large picture of our first ballet recital together.

After going through so many firsts together, it was challenging starting college at separate schools. This proved to be a minor inconvenience as the schools, University of Washington and Western Washington, were less than two hours apart and many weekends became short road trips to each other.

Our cell phone numbers dominated each other’s bills as daily minute-long messages became common to keep each other up to date on our lives. Two years into college we planned a winter getaway to Europe and spent a couple of weeks backpacking through Ireland and England together.

We never take each other’s friendship for granted. We are constantly sending each other letters or picking something up if it reminds us of the other. Whenever we are both in town in Spokane, it’s still just a couple houses away and a frequent visit for coffee or just to talk. Her family is mine and vice versa, ensuring that this friendship will not be ending anytime soon.

Klara Bowman, Spokane, writing about her friendship with Anna Sowa, who now lives in Bend, Ore. Both women graduated from college last spring.

Ronna Galbreath wrote about her group of high school friends:

“When our friend Anne was dying of pancreatic cancer a few years ago, all nine of us were in our hospital room at one time. We hid in there because we didn’t want the nurses to make us leave. But when the nurse came to check on Anne she looked around the room and said, ‘I can’t think of any better medicine’ and she left.

Bertha Hansen of Rathdrum, Idaho, wrote of her friend Margaret Bowen of Spokane:

“I woke up one day in the hospital with peritonitis and pneumonia after an operation. I didn’t want to worry my family that the outlook was bleak as to my recovery, but I confided in Margaret who checked on me several times a day. She alerted Terry (Hansen’s husband) who called in specialists immediately. I feel like she literally saved my life, and if it was possible we became even closer friends.”