原文：The Healing Power of Friendship

 Abigail Trafford

We sit around the rough wooden table in the summer cabin and take each other in. About 15 men and women who have one thing in common: we all went to elementary school together. Outside, waves pound the white sand beach, a hot wind whips the water. I bite into a turkey wrap and pass the potato chips. This is the class reunion of early childhood.

We go back more than a half a century to a small, semi-rural community where our grandparents were friends and our parents were defined by The War. A time and place where dads commuted to work and moms were bred to be matriarchs.

Some in the room are friends I’ve kept up with since childhood. Some are strangers, unseen for 40 years. Some are missing: a calssmate killed in Vietnam, another felled by pancreatic cancer a few years ago. But mostly we are all here and, after two days together, the reunion settles on a message. A stunningly pretty classmate, whose smile still reflects a fifth-grader’s mirth, sums it up. “What’s the most important in life is friendship. I don’t know what I’d do without my friends.” The room full of gray hair and resumes applauds in agreement.

Friendship is in the news. A recent book, “I Know Just What You Mean,” by columnist Ellen Goodman and novelist Patricia O’Brien chronicles their relationship over a quarter of a century. “We talk, therefore we are ---friends,” they write. Friendship is based on warmth, trust, shared experience. “Over a long life, full of disruptions, stops, and start-ups, friends can be the collaborators,” they contunue.

Decades of research have documented that friendship is good for your health. People who have friends have lower death rates. They recover faster from illness. They have lower rates of certain diseases.

Just why friendship is a healing force is the focus of much research. As scientists try to unravel biochemical pathways and hormone levels, I look around the table at my classmates. There are old memories of the blue-haired music teacher. There are turning points of weddings, births, funerals. Laughter and gossip. Crises of illness, despair, loss.

At its most basic level, friendship is a human connection that involves affection and intimacy. In the inner circle, there is a continual sharing of the most important details of your life. Close friends are those “to whom you feel so close that it is hard to imagine life without them,” explain geriatric experts John W. Rowe and Robert L. Kahn in “Successful Aging”, a popular account of the MacArthur Foundation Study of Aging in America.

As the reunion shifts from a picnic lunch to a gala dinner, we are no longer strangers. Some of us are Marco Polo types who left the area long ago. A large percentage stayed, raising their children as we were raised along well-worn paths. Yet the themes of being tested and finding a haven of loving relatiohships are the same. After all, it was back in nursery school that we first became friends. Since then, each of us has spread out and created new lives and new networks. It’s as though we were born into a certain biological family and have ended up with a diverse web of kinship. The inner circle today may include spouses, lovers, college roommates and cousins, children and grandchildren, colleagues and children of friends.

“We’re a special class,” says a man who took the Marco Polo route. “It’s because we have all these fantastic girls in the class.” Everyone laughs riotously. (We did, indeed, outnumber the boys.) This classmate is a model friend to many of us, the one who writes and telephones, bridging the gender divide and bringing us all together.

How empty life would be without such connections.

Doctors warn that a lack of friends can be hazardous to health. Isolation and alienation are risk factors for disease, much like smoking and high blood pressure.

Research with monkeys shows that adult females housed alone are twice as likely to develop atherosclerosis as animals that live in small groups. Medical students who are lonely have lower levels of natural disease-killing cells in their immune system. More than a dozen large studies form the United States to Japan have found that people without friends are between two and five times as likely to die prematurely as those who have close ties to friends and family. In a study of patients hospitalized for heart attacks, 38 percent of those without a social support network died in the hospital, compared with 11 percent of those who had support.

The experience of being loved, cherished, esteemed and cared for protects people form disease. It also makes life worthwhile.

Yet building an inner circle of intimates takes work, especially as people age and lose old friends. If only drug companies could bottle friendship, and doctors prescribe it.

Making-and keeping-friends is the ultimate task in self-care. It’s up to us to maintain connections---to make the phone call, send the E-mail, exchange the photographs.

That’s why we’ve started to plan for next year’s reunion.

我的译文：友谊的治愈功能

艾比盖尔·特拉福德

    我们围坐在夏季小屋里粗木桌旁相互嬉戏着。大约十五个男人女人有着一个共同点：我们同时入学。外面，波涛拍打着白砂沙滩，热风鞭笞着海水。我啃着火鸡又接过薯条。这就是幼儿教育时期的同学聚会。

    让我们回到半个世纪以前的一个小小的半农社区，那里我们的祖父祖母们曾是朋友，我们的父母受着战争的约束。那个时期那个地区，男人都被分配出去干活，女人都繁衍来做家庭主妇。

    屋里有些人是我童年时一起长大的朋友；有些已是40年未见的陌生人；有些已经不复存在了：一位同学在越南战死了，另一位几年前被胰腺癌夺走了。但我们大多数都还在并且我们一起两天后，有了同学聚会的消息。一位绝妙的可爱同学，微笑里仍然闪耀着五年级时欢乐的同学，组织了这次同学聚会。“友谊是生命中最不可或缺的，如果没有朋友，我将无所作为。”屋里都是白发老人，再度充斥着一致的赞赏声。

    友谊存在于交流中。誊写了近代小说《我懂你的意思》的专栏作家埃伦君和小说家帕特丽夏·欧布里恩，记录了他们将近二三十年的友谊。“我们交流，因为我们是朋友，”他们这样写到。友谊建立在激情、信任和经验的分享上。“在人漫长的一生中，有的是分离、驻足与启程，朋友则是协作者，”他们继续写到。

    几十年的研究已经显示友谊对于人们的健康是有益的。有朋友的人死亡率低。他们从疾病中很快恢复，他们患重病的几率也很小。

    而为什么友谊有治愈功能则是许多研究的重点。正如科学家们尝试着通过生化途径和荷尔蒙作用来阐明这个问题，我环顾四周看着我的同学。那里有蓝发音乐老师的记忆，那里有成为人生转折点的婚礼、出生、葬礼、欢声笑语、疾病的威胁、绝望和失落。

    在最基本的层面上，友谊是人类在情感和隐私上的联系。在核心集团间，人们长期分享着各自生命中最重要的细节。密友，用老年医学家瓦特·罗·约翰和卡恩·拉·罗伯特在著名的麦克阿瑟基金会对于美国老龄化研究中的《成功的老去》里的话来解释就是“那些你觉得很亲近并且没了他们生命就无法继续的朋友。”

    当重聚由便当野餐转变成主题宴会时，我们已不再是陌生人。我们有些是很久以前就离开这片领域的马可波罗者。大部分留下来养儿育女，就像我们依照平凡的途径被养大。然而我们经受考验的主题和寻找爱的天堂都是一样的。毕竟，我们最初成为朋友是在幼儿园。自那以后，我们各自发展，建立新的生活和网络。就如同尽管我们出生在一定的生物学家族却最终发展成多样的血缘关系网。现如今的核心集团可能包括夫妇、情人、大学同学、堂兄妹、子孙、同事和孩子的朋友。

    “我们是一个与众不同的班级，”一个重走马可波罗路线的人说。“因为我们有这些迷人的姑娘在班里。”每个人都放纵的笑着。（我们有，确实，超过男生人数的）。这位同学是我们中很多人的典型朋友，他写信打电话，抛开性别分歧把我们联系在了一起。

    没有这样的联系，生活将会如何的空虚?

    医生警告说缺少朋友将危害健康。孤立和疏远会有患病的危险，就跟吸烟和高血压存在隐患一样。

    对猴子的研究中显示，独居的成年女性有着小群居动物两倍的患动脉硬化的可能性。孤独的医科学生体内免疫系统中的自生疾病杀手细胞的水平很低。从美国到日本的十几个大的研究项目中发现，比起那些和朋友或家人有着密切联系的人，没有朋友的人有着2到5倍的可能英年早逝。在一项对住院的心脏病患者研究中，相比于11%有社会支撑的病人，有38%没有社会支撑网的病人死在医院。

    被人爱、被人珍爱、受人尊敬和被人关怀的经历使人们免受病痛。这同样使生命变得有意义。

    然而建立一个密友核心圈需要付出，尤其是随着年龄的增长我们会不断失去老朋友。要是医生开的药能使友谊长存那该有多好啊！

    交友和维持友谊是自我照顾最根本的任务。是否保持联系取决于我们——打电话、发邮件或者交换照片？

    这就是我们又着手计划明年的同学聚会的原因。