Living in Limbo

I'm married but I don't have a husband, or is it that I have a husband but I'm not married?  It's strange, this living in limbo, neither married or single.  I asked my husband many years ago why he married me and he said, "I don't know."  (It's something he says quite frequently now.)  I suppose at the time it seemed like a good idea.  He wanted a home, a family and a social life of his own.  Marriage would provide those things.  Unfortunately, he didn't want anything else to change.

Change brings change, you gain some things and lose some others and in his case, he lost some of his family connections. Some of the family connections that he lost had been very damaging but he regretted losing them all the same.  His brother-in-law had warned him before his marriage to beware of his sister and her husband as they were likely to cause trouble, and they did.  Now, 46 years later, my husband and that sister are the only surviving members of the family and they have had no contact for most of our married life.  The last contacts we did have were not pleasant.  In three days this sister will be 90, surely a cause for celebration, but we are as dead to her.  How sad to live so long with such venom and bitterness against those who should mean the most to you.  Whatever happened in their growing up years on the farm must have left scars that cannot be erased. My husband remembers only the good of those years and she remembers only the bad.  Who will go first?  What legacy will they leave the next generation?  We don't live to ourselves and when we try, it doesn't go well.  May their souls rest in peace at the end.