Indignity

You think you're over certain things, and can often be surprised by the intensity of long-forgotten feelings when some event takes place to bring them out again: they were only sleeping, they were never really gone.

My ex-father-in-law's memorial service was this past weekend. Talking about it to friends, I compared it to "a high school reunion on acid." I'm truly sorry that he's gone. We weren't at all close, but it's always profoundly shocking when someone who you remember as living and breathing and being - well, whatever you thought he was - suddenly isn't.

And the memorial service itself: heavy with sorrow and disappointed hopes, soaked with hard booze (and it was barely lunchtime!), and filled with people I had kind of forgotten ever actually existed. Perfectly nice people, by and large: high school friends of my ex-husband and his brother's, people we used to hang out with years and years and years ago. Ex-girlfriends of my ex-husband's, from around the time he and I were married.

And during. Long-forgotten indignities surface here. Bitterness about this, at this point, would be beyond pointless: any issues I had with that were issues I had with him, not at all with them; besides, why be possessive of something you don't want? Which I didn't. Did I? Otherwise, why would I have been so anxious to throw it away?

I guess the main thing that hurt then, and that rears its ugly head now, is the sense of being rejected and abandoned as not good enough by someone who (you might or might not agree) was not even good enough for me in the first place. What an agonizing, maddening, throw-yourself-onto-your-stomach-and-kick-the-floor kind of feeling.

It passes, it goes away; it always has, and everything will be forgotten again. And all I have to do is sit tight until it's gone so I don't do anything stupid and make more of an idiot of myself than I already am.

You'd think I was a grown-up now. You wouldn't think this would still be so hard.