“You look down,” Rob remarked after dinner last evening. “Anything wrong?”

I didn’t really want to go into it, but it’s no use trying to pretend with my husband. He reads me too well.

“I was just thinking about Wally’s son,” I said. “His visitation is tonight and funeral tomorrow.”

“Wally was Will’s best friend,” Rob reminded me, “not yours.”

“I know. It wasn’t my responsibility to keep him in touch or to make sure that he saw Dee,” I said. “But it’s not like I didn’t know Spence. We saw those kids quite a bit in the early years of our marriage. I knew that little boy.”

And he’s dead now – which went without saying.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that his death represents more severing with the past for me and it’s on that level that I am most affected. Cold? Maybe. And maybe not. I am sorry for Wally and Cherish’s loss in that empathetic way of parents. Losing a child is a horror that being widowed can’t even compete with, but I haven’t see Wally in over 4 years and the last time I saw Cherish, just before Christmas of 2006, I was handed a load of crap about Wally needing space still.

Okay, maybe not a full load of crap. As I mentioned, Wally did eventually reach out a year later. It’s not my fault he couldn’t deal with the fact that I had naturally gone on with my life. People from back in the days of Will expected me to sit and wait for them to catch up emotionally not remembering that I dealt daily and they dealt when they couldn’t avoid it. Definitely on different timelines.

And Spence’s death comes pretty close on the heels of the beginning of year 5.

Yes, I do keep track of the number of years my first husband has been dead. Sort of.

About a week before the anniversary in late January, Rob asked how I was doing with the date looming.

“It’s still a bit off,” I said, “but I’m okay. It’s not until the 26th.”

“23rd,” he corrected me.

“Oh yeah, the 23rd. I always forget.”

And I do. Always forget the exact day. With Will having been not really figuring in the day-to-day of my life for so long, his death was almost anticlimactic. I’d been on my own for over two years. In a lot of significant ways, I am really gearing up for my 7th anniversary though widow purists would not agree.

I think the events of this week have brought up, yet again, my sore points. Will’s friends. Their abandonment of him. The way they have rewritten history to avoid acknowledging the extent his illness mentally maimed him so they feel better about what they did, didn’t and continue to do. And the way that I am still maligned in their circles as though I could have done anything differently or better that would have changed outcomes.

I do so hate being spun around. I am not Lot’s Wife, after all, I don’t miss anything back there enough to turn around on my own.

Oh well.