The Wandering Librarian

A week ago, I received news I wasn’t prepared for. A dear friend had passed away — the stepmother of my ex-husband. On the surface, that description might sound distant, even clinical. But the reality of who she was to me is so much richer and more complicated than a title can capture.

When I was married to my first husband, his family didn’t feel like his family — they felt like mine. We spent most holidays together at their home in Michigan, trading the noise and warmth of big family gatherings. When my husband and I moved to Alabama, distance didn’t cool the relationship. His father and stepmother made the trip to visit us. We went on vacations together. We made memories at their cabins in Northern Michigan — the kind of slow, unhurried time that stitches people together in ways you don’t fully appreciate until much later.

And then the marriage ended.

After seven years, my ex-husband and I divorced, and I braced myself for the inevitable: that his family would become strangers to me. What surprised me — what moved me — was that most of them didn’t want that. They reached out. They wanted to stay in touch. Their love, it turned out, hadn’t been conditional on the marriage at all.

But I let outside voices talk me out of accepting what they were offering. Well-meaning people told me that staying close to an ex-husband’s family was strange, inappropriate, a little too tangled. And so, against my own instincts and against my own heart, I began to pull away. I kept a thread of connection with my former mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law, but even those threads grew thinner over the years — phone calls less frequent, messages more sparse, until the silence between us stretched longer than the conversations ever had.

It is one of the regrets I carry most quietly, and most heavily.

The news of my ex-mother-in-law’s death didn’t just bring grief for her — though that grief is real and raw. It reopened something older: the loss I’d been quietly carrying for years, the loss of a family I had chosen, and who had chosen me back, and whom I had slowly let go of because someone told me I was supposed to.

She was a loving person. They all were. And they had kept their hearts open to me even when the circumstances of my life gave them every excuse to close them. That kind of grace deserves better than what I gave it.

So now I sit with a layered kind of mourning. There is grief for her — for the woman herself, for what her loss means to the people who loved her most. And there is grief for time, for distance, for the version of myself that listened to the wrong advice and let something precious quietly slip away.

The question I’m sitting with now is a tender one: What do I do with this?

Do I reach out to reconnect with people I haven’t properly spoken to in years, knowing that a death has just broken open all of our hearts? Or do I simply grieve — honor both losses privately, and accept that some chapters, once closed, are meant to stay that way?

The practical voice in me notes the obvious: I’ve remarried. I live on a different continent now. Life has moved in directions no one could have predicted. Reconnecting would require intention, vulnerability, and the courage to say I’m sorry I let so much time pass.

But another part of me — the part that still lights up when I think about those Michigan cabins, those holiday tables, those people — wonders if it’s not too late. Grief has a way of clarifying what actually matters. And what I know, sitting here with this fresh loss layered over an old one, is that those people mattered to me. They still do.

Maybe that’s worth saying out loud.