Somewhat unsettling...

image from Clipart Library

A few days back I did something that I'm pretty sure most of us have done at some time, if we are honest: I looked up my ex-husband (extremely "ex", I might add ~ I left him 40 years ago!) on Facebook, for no good reason other than plain and simple idle curiosity.

Unlike mine, his profile is public and I saw that his relationship status said "widowed".  My immediate reaction on seeing this was that I felt very sad for him, and for his children too.  His wife who was, I believe, the same age as me passed away earlier this year.  It also appears that his brother has passed away fairly recently, too.

I confess that initially I was somewhat unsettled by my feelings of sadness when I found this out about his life.  Our separation and divorce was not amicable so at the very least I would have expected to feel indifference to his losses.  That perhaps sounds harsher than I mean it to; the deaths of two people still only in their early 60s, despite one being someone I didn't know at all and the other, because of his job, someone I had only met a handful of times, nevertheless is still sad.

As I say, without going into all the "gory" details, the ending of our marriage and the wider family fallout that followed, was unpleasant; I was left feeling hurt, angry and confused for many years in its wake.  Poor Adrian has had way more of my emotional baggage to contend with than he ever deserved; nevertheless we weathered the storms and over 40 years later our relationship is as strong and stable as ever.

So I guess the fact that I felt a wave of sadness for my ex is a good thing, so far as I personally am concerned; it has shown me that I have indeed moved on from an emotionally unpleasant part of my life.  Perhaps my idle curiosity was a nudge from ~ oh, I don't know, the universe perhaps?  At any rate from somewhere/someone that it was time to acknowledge that a lot of healing has taken place.  I know myself well enough by now to accept that I will never be able to fully let that experience go, however I am more at peace with that than I have ever been before.