Feeling sad

I've been corresponding via email and Classmates.com with a friend from high school. Actually, our relationship goes much further back than that. We lived next door to each other when we were children. She's mentioned some updates on people we were in school with--this one's daughter died of an overdose, that one's husband died. I'm not sure all the sadness is worth keeping in touch with people, but then, I'd rather know than not know. It's not like I can do anything, but each person's life is worth something. People deserve to be grieved for and sympathisized with. It's the least we can do for others. Even if they don't know we're sharing their pain, and it doesn't relieve their pain in the least, more than likely, it makes us more human to recognize others' tragedies and triumphs.

I've been thinking about family and how pathetic my own little immediate family has become. We connect with Stephen once a week (on his terms). Now and then we connect with Daniel. On his terms. I don't get to talk to Heather often. Facebook lets me share in other people's family happinesses and their closeness, but I don't get to have that sense of closeness any longer with my own two sons. I don't feel anger toward my husband for dragging us so far away, but I know that absence physically can and often does lead to absence emotionally. If we'd stayed in Missouri, who knows how different our world and life would be? But that's moot. We are here, they are there, and the love and sense of sharing lives is fractured. Now I don't even get to live with my own husband half the week. Yes, I could drive back each evening, but it wouldn't take long for me to grow to resent that as much as Ellie grew to resent the daily trek from Savannah to Stateboro, and in all honesty, the resentment my husband had for the thrice-weekly trek he made (for seven years) from Columbia to Warrensburg, MO. I didn't appreciate how hard that was for him then, I'm ashamed to admit. I had no sympathy for how difficult it was for him. Now I do have sympathy, but I'm sure he's feeling that it's too little too late. I'm getting "my turn."

This isn't where I wanted to be. It isn't what I wanted to be doing. By this point in my life, I'd wanted to be cuddling grandchildren. I wanted to live just half an hour away from my sons and their wives and children and cats and dogs. I wanted my friends all nearby, ready, willing, and able to share a Sunday barbecue or a quick potluck. I did not want to be living for only part of a week in a huge house, with neighbors I barely know, and family too far away to see more often than once or twice a year.

Okay, enough of the pity party. I started feeling down when I heard about Marty's recurrent cancer, and it's really sucked the juice out of my weekend.