finishing Friends

Nearly a year ago, J and I started watching Friends straight through, from The Pilot to The Last One. Eleven months and 238 episodes later, we finally finished it the other night. And I have to admit it: I cried.

Not just because I’m sad it’s over – though I am, to be honest. We’ve pulled out the DVDs this year whenever we’d had a hard day or needed a reason to laugh, or just wanted to spend some time cuddling and cracking up together. We re-watched episodes we’ve seen a dozen times (The One Where No One’s Ready; The One With the Embryos; The One Where Everybody Finds Out) and watched many others for the first time. (And we watched the gag reels on all the later seasons – the Season 7 gag reel, particularly, makes me laugh so hard I WEEP.) I got to know the Friends better than I ever had before, and came to care deeply about their stories and their intertwined story. And when they all walked out of the apartment for the last time, I welled up.

But I also cried because we’re finishing Friends right as we embark on a major life transition. Our little Friends-style crew is scattering, four of us to Boston, one to Nashville and several staying in Abilene. People are, or have been, graduating and moving and getting married and starting new jobs. (None of us will have the same addresses as last year, come Christmas-card time.) Nate and Abi’s house (now Kelsey’s house) was our equivalent of Monica’s apartment, and our days of birthday parties and games of Encore and movie nights, just “the crew,” are over for now.

Of course, as I mentioned last week, Nate and Abi will be in Boston with us – I can’t tell you how glad that makes me. And we’ll see Bethany soon; Kelsey is coming for Thanksgiving; I’m sure Jake and Sarah, Bailey and Grace, will come visit at some point. But I’ll still miss our evenings together. And I’ll miss J’s and my evenings howling with laughter at Joey’s antics or Chandler’s dumb jokes or Monica’s neuroses.

I read somewhere once that Friends was a stroke of genius because it was ostensibly about friends, but was really about family. We’ve come to love it, fittingly, in the time of life when your friends are your family. And our tight little family of friends all love it as much as we do.

We’ll be watching reruns for sure, and quoting it at every turn as we’ve been doing for several years (way before we started watching it all). But as Brent said the other day, you only watch Friends once for the first time – so, for now, it’s just a little bittersweet.