My ex-husband died. How weird is that?  I mean certainly it happens. People die. We get old. We get sick. We get hit by lightening. We get eaten by tigers. But….My ex-husband died. We had been out of touch for years. I never regretted our divorce. He drank too much. He was unbelievably moody. He found a bay leaf I accidentally left in a lasagna and didn’t talk to me for 3 days. I spent 11 years tiptoeing around his bad days, making excuses for him, waiting for the first sign of an upswing like a dog for a bone, thrilling when he finally felt better and spoke to me again. I knew it wasn’t about me. It was never about me. And when he was happy, everyone was happy. But I left our marriage some time before we actually separated, and when I finally realized, with a lot of love and a place to crash from my friend, Jenny and her then husband, Brett, that I didn’t have to let the fear of being alone keep me in a bad relationship, we divorced. It was infinitely easier on me than on him. I was free! I barely looked back. Oh, I’d check out his Facebook page periodically, secretly a little smug that I was aging so much better than him and a lot relieved when he lost his job at 60 because his hands were no longer steady enough, thanking the powers-that-be that I was well out of that mess.  But…My ex-husband died.  And now, I find myself obsessively looking at pictures of him and  reading his posts, thinking, how did I not see that he didn’t look well. Perhaps he hadn’t been well in a while. And I want to know everything, how he thought, what his life had been like, what his last days were like, was he happy, did he suffer? A friend of his saw him in February and said he talked about me. He remembered me fondly. I found myself leaping on that crumb and wanting more. Why? Why, now after so many years with barely a backward glance, do I want to know what was going on in this man’s life, his head, his heart. Because he’s gone. Because if there were answers to be had, they are gone with him. This man I slept with, lived with, loved, hated, hurt and got hurt by, my ex-husband died.  

LIFE, A Bracelet in 6 Acts
carynjune