One commonality among all the grieving people I know is regret. For many of us, the regret is small(ish) but others are plagued by regret. People wish they could take back something they said or did or do or say something that was left undone or unsaid. Often the regret is about something that seemed innocuous in the moment but in the aftermath of the death, takes on outsized significance.
I’ve mentioned before my own regret about how I responded to my late husband’s pain. My insight about how to respond better came too late. I would give anything to be able to apologize to him for not getting it right at the time. I spoke with two widowed friends in the past week who are experiencing similar regrets. The impossibility of ever apologizing or explaining themselves weighed on them heavily. They both wondered, could their dead partner ever forgive them?
I choose to believe that our dead loved ones hold no grudges, that they miss us as feverishly as we miss them, and that just as we wish we could do-over some of our interactions, they have the same wish.
We couldn’t have known then what we know now. Had we known the day or moment they would die, we might have behaved differently, but we didn’t know. Had they known the day or moment they would die, they might have behaved differently, but they didn’t know. We did the best we could in the moment, and I think our dead loved ones recognize that more readily than we do.
I choose to believe that the dead are more enlightened than we are and that they do not hold us responsible for not having had the knowledge we have now when they were alive.
Sometimes when I am wishing I had done or said something to Tom differently, I try to see myself in that moment through his eyes. He believed me to be smart, strong, compassionate, and capable. He appreciated my caregiving and loved me as much as I loved him. He might wish I had been more patient sometimes or done things differently, but he knew I was thrown into being a caregiver the same way he was thrown into being a care recipient. Neither of us had been prepared for those roles and we gave each other a lot of grace. I try to give myself the same grace Tom gave me.
I also try to keep in mind that my memories aren’t always reliable. My recollection of how I behaved or what I did or didn’t do isn’t nearly as accurate as I think it was. I trust that my dead husband will give me the benefit of the doubt because he loved me and that’s what people who love each other do.
These are choices I make about what to believe. I was raised in a tradition built on guilt and felt tremendous guilt after my mother died. I believed I could have saved her (I found her after school, still alive but unresponsive—and as an example of the unreliability of memory, my sister believes that she’s the one who found our mother, so one of us must be wrong) and that she died because I waited too long to call anyone. I regretted every argument we’d had, and there had been many. I wished I hadn’t physically pushed her way the last time she tried to hug me. I especially was sorry I had told her I was embarrassed by her.
For years, I cried myself to sleep most nights under the weight of this guilt. It was proof that I was a bad person. But gradually, I began to see myself as a not-so-bad person and that version of me was able to see my mother as a troubled but generous person who would certainly forgive me for the things I did as a tween that were actually totally appropriate for a tween. My mother had been a fourth through sixth grade teacher who knew tween behavior. Of course she would forgive me.
I still wish I hadn’t behaved the way I did toward her, but I also understand the behavior of tween me as normal and forgivable. Regret over the behavior is not worth carrying around with me as a weight to hold me down.
I can’t tell other grieving people what to believe, but I hope that whatever you believe, it is something that does not hold you down.
You must be logged in to post a comment.