maybe this will be the last time i have to cry about this

Longtime readers may remember that my father died 13 years ago (in fact I lit his yahrzeit candle last night ❤️) and that my mother took up with a widowed family friend not long afterward and told us, my brother and me, about it in a manner so astoundingly insensitive that our relationship never really recovered. (The description at that link says he, the um-friend, invited her on the European river cruise, but in fact I learned some time later that inviting her hadn't been his intention; he'd mentioned it in a way of saying it would have been nice to have been able to plan something like that with company and she went ahead and invited herself to join him, because it turns out this woman may never have seen a boundary worth respecting in her entire life.) I'm not going to go hunting for the exact email at this time, but I have a pretty clear memory that it included the assurance "I would never do anything to hurt you" and that in the conversation the three of us had in which the two of us said we were unhappy about the suddenness of the seriousness of their relationship, the message we got from her was you're going to need to deal with those feelings. It wasn't exactly "I would never hurt you" / "This hurts us" / "I'm going to do it anyway" but it wasn't a million miles off.

( Aftermarket cut to hide 950-odd words of illustration )

Anyway. The old man passed away peacefully yesterday afternoon. He was a nice guy. He saved my mother's life at least twice. He was a product of a time and a place that may have been responsible for his having some attitudes that I didn't always care for, but you know, what can you do. Mainly, he was important to my mother, which was fine, but I was never able to forget that he'd been more important to her than our feelings were, which was not. I'm very sorry for his children and grandchildren. I myself will not miss him. I'm not going to pretend there was never any such person or anything, but a small selfish still-hurt place inside me hopes that now that he's gone, my mother will think about him less and less.