Snodderly, Hopefloats, BND, AH, Imp, - thanks for the well wishes for my trip. I am of course very excited!! and not at all ready. I do get a bit nervous before I leave about all the misc. things that I should have gotten done...

Okay = another weird encounter..sigh. How is it that my life is filled with this stuff now? I would rather read it in a novel.

So my h calls tonite, to talk to ME. Very unusual. He has really really withdrawn this summer in a way that is farther away than ever in the whole time he has been gone. In some ways this has been good for me of course. And frankly I miss more of what we had than I miss the person of him. I no longer have that constant dialogue with him going in on my head, thank god that is gone. Just occasionally have something I want to tell him. But that is almost no more difficult to bear than the little thngs I would like to share with other friends who are far away.

Anyhow after a bit of biz, he told me there will be a memorial service for his dad next month after we get back. It will be the weekend of Oct 7 and he thought maybe I would like to go (midwest - I met him there and lived there for 15 yrs)! Apparently my sons are going to try to go... though they had not mentioned the details (like the date) to me. It is hard for me to imagine how this would be anything but totally weird for me. Exactly one month before our divorce is final!

But - I can hardly think of it anyway because on that Sunday I have another wedding to go to here - my cousin. My parents are coming in for the weekend, and this has been planned for over a year. So... even as he was asking I knew I could not go. I told him that you know.. if we were truly married, I would of course go. But under the circumstances...

Perhaps this is reaching out. Hard to say what it is. Meanwhile his back is out, he can hardly roll over, he got a bee sting, lost his car keys for a day, and all in all a very bad time. This is the bottom he said. I don't believe that. I think it was a very bad day/maybe even a bad week.

He talked to me about 45 mins on the phone about his problems, his dad, his mom who passed away 12 yrs ago, his workmate whose dad died last week... Comfortable conversation as it has been much of the time. We were always good together. Makes it harder to let go. But let go I must b/c that is the reality.

I invited him over to watch the demise of a very large but diseased hemlock tree I am having removed this week. He has been systematically dissing all invites. Now, I do not want to be pulled into thinking about him or obsessing about what he is thinking, what he is going to do, etc. etc. My life is mine and must go on.
xxx Amy

P.S. I must confess that I have been working this summer on a letter to my h because my therapist suggested this. The thing is - that in order to do this non-contested/mediated divorce, we have to sign a statement that says it is due to irreconcileable differences or something like that. I did not want to sign it, but did not want to have to make this go into a nasty, lawyerly contested business either. So the suggestion was to write a letter to tell him how I feel. I will post it to you all at some point.