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HISTORY
The Things I Wish I Could Forget
Post-divorce, my brain is full of useless information, and history
My husband of twenty-eight years remarried, at age 58, to a woman who does not know his history. And even though I don’t want or need any contact with him for the foreseeable future, my 62-year-old brain is full to the brim of useless information I wish I could forget. So many facts, and memories, and family tales I once thought were so important, or clever, or funny. All of the things that made him, him. Now, what do I do with them?
For one, his new wife will never have the opportunity to meet the most important person in my husband’s life: his cherished grandmother. She died just shy of the age of 100 while we were still married and divorce was not even a shadow on the horizon. She was a force to be reckoned with, and one of the few people my husband truly loved, as much as he is capable of loving. I was witness to his pain when she died; his new wife was not. And there is only so much he can communicate in the telling — you kind of had to be there.
I remember every story his family matriarch ever told me, like the one about my husband’s spontaneous “Pledge-of-Allegiance” outburst at a family Seder. At age four, he had something to say, and he said it. Now, it’s forever recorded in family…
