Sum up the reactions of Ivan Ilyich's colleagues to the news of his death. What is implied in Tolstoy’s calling them ”so-called friends”?

Ivan Ilyich's associates are described as "so-called friends" because they apparently do not feel genuinely close to the man while he was alive, and even after he has died, they all seem to regard it an unpleasant duty to pay their sympathies to his widow and attend his funeral.
But Tolstoy is not condemning these men, Peter, Fedor, and Schwartz, so much as observing that the entire scene depicted in the novella's opening is an illustration of what normally happens when anyone dies, even a respected and basically good man such as Ivan Ilyich. To look back at the first few pages, after one has read the whole story, is to be struck not just by the casual reaction of the friends when they read his obituary, but also by the fact that the outside world knows only that "Ivan Ilyich had been ill for several weeks" and then passed away. The huge turmoil and excruciating pain of Ivan Ilyich's last months have been summed up so briefly that his friends have no idea of the magnitude of what has happened to him. But, Tolstoy seems to be saying, isn't this the way it is with everyone? It's only those who are with a dying person every day—the spouse, the children, and in this case the servants like Gerasim—who witness what actually takes place on the road to death. And then, after it's over, life simply goes on for everybody else.
That the friends find the sympathy call an awkward, painful task is stated in a matter-of-fact way by Tolstoy. No one knows what to say or how to act. The friends are relieved this isn't happening to them. It's really only on a subconscious level that they recognize they too are going to die, as with all people who are healthy and have no reason to believe the end will occur soon. Although death is the one certainty in this world, everyone seems to act as if it's not going to happen to me.
That said, Peter, Fedor, and especially Schwartz seem to be particularly extreme examples of this type of human blindness. And had they felt closer to Ivan Ilyich, more engaged with him on a personal level in life, they would not have acted so casually upon hearing of his death. The point is that even in life Ivan Ilyich was isolated. The reactions of his wife, brother-in-law, and children (especially his daughter) are not much different from those of the so-called friends. When Praskovya Fedorovna's brother comes for a visit and, after seeing that Ivan Ilyich is wasting away, asks her what it is that's wrong him, she replies, with an obvious lack of emotion, "Nobody knows. One doctor says one thing and the other says something different." Her marriage to Ivan Ilyich is another in the long line of failed marriages and relationships in Tolstoy's works overall.
Ivan Ilyich is represented as an everyman, a man who is alone and having to deal with the universe on his own. Tolstoy states, even before narrating the story of Ivan's deterioration, that his fate is not unusual, and therefore, it is the more terrible. At the close of the story Ivan Ilyich screams in agony for three days, cut off completely from the human world. In his tortured thoughts he struggles to find what he's done wrong in life. The answer seems to be that, in Tolstoy's view, the material world that has been the focus of Ivan Ilyich's life is meaningless, and death and the nextlife are the only reality.