Thank you VERY much everyone for sharing your thoughts. I've been busy preparing for the funeral tomorrow so I won't have a chance to reply to each specific post until afterward but I wanted to check in quickly.
XH, his sister, and I got together last night to play TT and then went to dinner for 2 hours afterward. It was a very comfortable, relaxed, nice evening. They both seem stressed. I think it was good for XH to smash some TT balls. He needed to do that..........Earlier in the day X-SIL forwarded me an email exchange she'd had with XH yesterday morning. He blew up at her saying that she hadn't paid enough attention to their mother. This is something that has been brewing for as long as I have known XH and I know that she has replied to him about this before. She just hasn't given him the answer he wanted. She wrote a beautiful response and included an apology to him because she hadn't been able to have warm fuzzy feelings for their mother. X-SIL said that she had really worked to change the personal issues she'd developed because of being an adult child of an alcoholic. She told XH that he had done a very nice job of writing about their mother's "Last Night" and encouraged him to continue journaling because she has found it to be very healing.
I spoke with Jody today. She gave me a couple unexpected insights and some very practical ideas about how to handle the situation tomorrow. The two unexpected insights were:
--when XH criticizes women in his life (e.g. 1st W, a long-time female friend) it likely indicates he thinks that R difficulties are the result of women being challenging.
--if GF#2 is present in a prominent way at the funeral tomorrow it can help XH to get over the hurdle that he has put in his head that GAG does not know about GF#2. But if GAG continues to be friendly and casual and fun after being witness to his R with GF#2, it puts to rest what he might have told himself about whether or not I would still be open to him even after he has been involved with another woman. (Hope that was understandable.)
