More on Great Laws

It seems that there is some research going on to confirm the Hakkarainen Law of Great Events. As previously noted, this law says that, in any great event in your life, someone important to you will let you down or be absent.
Yesterday, the New York Times published an essay, Coping With Crises Close to Someone Else’s Heart by Harriet Brow, about this phenomenon. While dealing with illnesses of her daughters and the dying and death of her mother, Brown wrote,

For the most part, we were blessed with support and love; friends ran errands for us, delivered meals, sat in hospital waiting rooms, walked, talked and cried with us.
But a couple of friends disappeared entirely. During the year we spent in eating-disorder hell, they called once or twice but otherwise behaved as though we had been transported to Mongolia with no telephones or e-mail.

"Other people’s reactions are multifaceted,” writes one psychologist . “There’s no formula, and it’ll change from person to person." It may be that the vanishing friends were paralyzed first by their feelings of helpless and then by the guilt of being paralyzed in the first place.
There's a summary of the article as well as some insightful comments at the Well blog - When Friends Disappear During a Health Crisis.