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A friend's illness can sometimes provoke unconscious and irrational responses.

Someone might be so upset by a friend's illness they withdraw from the relationship or behave unhelpfully.

Examining how you handle your own illnesses can bring awareness to your feelings about a friend's.

When a friend falls ill, avoid reactivity by letting them guide your response.

I’m at a stage of life when friends fall ill as a matter of course. That didn’t used to happen. People I knew ended up in the hospital, yes, certainly during the AIDS epidemic, which called upon friends to respond personally and politically. Otherwise, hospitalizations were rare events, like when my then 40-year-old husband’s appendix burst at an economics conference in a Russian backwater. Now, illness is a routine part of my friendship network’s weekly news: Who got diagnosed with what? Who’s confronting some chronic condition? Who’s bereft? Sickness has become so integrated into our social lives that my peers and I are getting a crash course in who we are when friends fall ill. The answer seems to be surprisingly complicated.

Illness is emotionally demanding. It just is — for some people more than others. Where one person can take it in their stride, others react strongly, sometimes irrationally. That’s true, too, when we ourselves get sick. But at least then our behavior doesn’t necessarily affect other people we love who can be feeling very vulnerable. Even among those who can respond comfortably........

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