Background - am an only child, parents both dead. Family members are three elderly cousins who live 400 miles away. I am divorced, estranged from DS, intermittent contact with DD1. DD2, however, lives with me and we are close. She will leaving to go to university in September.
20 years ago I had a very close friend (J) whom I saw almost every day. I introduced her to another very close friend (A). I moved to the far north. They became extremely close - I didn't realise how close. (A) struggled with cancer for 4 years and died early in January. She asked me to visit her just after Christmas and we knew it would be to say goodbye. A week before she asked me not to go, saying that she would have a houseful of family members. They are a very close family and I completely understood. Until, that is, I found that (J), my original close friend, and her husband had visited on the day I was supposed to go, with their children. So, 5 of them went to add to the houseful and I was asked not to go.
If I had never found out (I heard at the funeral) I would have been fine. It was made worse by (J) talking at length about how I had originally introduced her to (A).
I am now eaten up because I didn't get to say goodbye and (J) did. My life experiences have made me extremely independent - I don't ask for help because there is no-one to ask so I get on with it, being it falling in love with the wrong person, doing up the new house single-handed or dealing with an extremely difficult situation at work.
This knowledge that to one friend I wasn't as close as I had thought has left me devastated. J has become completely Establishment while A was, like me, slightly anarchic.