It happens every year.  We send out a batch of Christmas letters and a few weeks later the post office returns a couple of them, or a family member writes with the sad news that a once-a-year friend had died.  It happened this year.  A son wrote that both his parents had died in the past year. Nam was in his 80s and Lin, perhaps a decade or so younger.

Nam and Lin and their three sons – well, two of their sons; the third was their American baby – came to the United States as refugees from Vietnam during the Boat People crisis of the 1970s.  The story of their escape was one of great drama and danger as they became separated at sea and not reunited until months later at a refugee processing center in the U.S.  In time, the church in Oregon I would serve in the 1980s sponsored the family and provided a home for them in a small house on the church grounds and a job for Nam as church custodian.  Nam would serve the church for nearly 40 years, and I shared eight of those years with him.

I have been thinking about Nam since we received the word of his death.  I had forgotten what a good friend he was.  Nam was a tailor by trade but had been a bartender on an American base during the war years.  His English was good enough to take drink orders in an officers’ club, but sometimes difficult to understand in deeper conversation.  But we had deep conversations.  I had deeper and better conversations with Nam than with anyone on the ministry staff or others on the support staff. Nam was a friend.

It turns out that similar backgrounds and common experiences were not necessary for an abiding friendship.  Nam told me about his life in Vietnam and some of the details of their escape.  I suppose I told him about growing up in the American suburbs, and he probably listened well even though my stories involved little danger or drama.  We commiserated about the sometimes-impossible expectations of church members, and the even-then confusing state of American education. Nam figured there were no student behavior problems that could not be solved by allowing a little corporal punishment into the classroom.  Mostly we just talked in the comfortable and easy-going ways that friends talk.

Nam and I did not communicate much in the last thirty years, but when we did, our friendship always started up where we left off.

Around the church it was easy to talk about Nam as our “Vietnamese custodian.”  And though he and Lin became U.S. citizens – I remember the day! – they never really lost their identities as refugees.  You probably never do.  But when we heard from their son that Nam and Lin had died during the past year, I remembered the friend Nam was and gave thanks for him.