There has been a loss in the universe, I can sense it.  It's hollow and  echoes now.  Some one I loved, who once loved me like a grandmother would, has died.  Yes, she lived a long life, but that's not the point now.  What I feel now is an emptiness that is severe and intolerable.  It is all the more extreme since I had been denied having her in my life for the last five years.
When I divorced I didn't know that my ex would yank so many people out of my life and not ever permit me to talk or see them.  He surgically removed me from all aspects of his life and that included people as well.  He refuses to tell me how they are, what they are doing; and in this instance, that they have died.

It's bitter, this feeling that someone could be so spiteful as to manipulate emotions like this, so carefully planned-I think.  It's not as though I haven't apologized for hurting him, his family, his friends--I took all of the blame for such an awfully long time.  I thought he'd forgive me.  Maybe he has, but he will never forget and he continues to hurt me in anyway he can.  And he's a very smart man, so he knows a  myriad of ways in which to do so.  Perhaps I was too quick to assume he would stop the games once he remarried.

But this has been yet another of a long line of painful lessons for me:  He will never tell me how things really are, he will give me a version most apt to hurt me.    What a shame, and I used to respect him.

My good friend, the one who is now gone, would have told me to let it go.  She would've said, "Stop giving him such power over you."  That's what I've been doing for the past five years and it's time to stop.  It's time to move one and let go of all of the people he tried to cut out of my heart.  As Neruda once wrote:  "Love is so short, forgetting so long."

Somebody say, "hell, yeah."