Regret

Friday Fragment #43

I wish you hadn’t slipped on the ice outside the school that winter. And I wish I hadn’t felt shame when I saw you there. I can’t remember if you went to hospital, or if we continued on to our lessons. You were younger then than I am now. I wish you hadn’t rushed drying the trousers over the back of the chair, the burners of the gas fire on full, a hole scorched into the inside leg, jagged molten edges that stabbed at my skin all through the school day. I wish your father’s sister hadn’t arrived at the doorstep one day and told you that you weren’t fit to mother, when she must have known that you simply weren’t well enough to always be a mother. I wish you had managed to afford the football shirts you promised each Christmas, that we craved so much: not for our satisfaction, but for you to feel your children’s happiness. I wish the rent arrears hadn’t built up. I wish they’d let you keep the house. I wish you’d never experienced those moments when you were high, crazy-scary high, impossible-to-be-around high. I wish there had never been trying to guess what was wrong, when understanding was beyond your reach too. I wish you’d never had to endure the tumbling, crashing lows that followed, when we lost you for whole weeks at a time to that small back bedroom. I wish that same Darkness hadn’t come for you every month, without fail. I wish that I’d given you more of my time. I wish now that I could give you all of my time. I wish that my daughter had arrived one week earlier, so that when I phoned you that morning to let you know that you had a grandchild, certain that I could pierce that Darkness, you would not have let silence hang thick in the air between us… and then tell me that you had to finish mopping the floor, that there was other housework to be done, and that maybe we could speak later. I wish it hadn’t taken that phone call and all of those years to fully comprehend your struggle. But it did and I was thirty years old. Sometimes, more than anything else, I wish you’d held me more as a child, found my hand, or your hand my cheek or hair, so that you might allow me to hold and touch you now in that same protective way. Regrets must not consume us, their purpose should not be to ‘smother our sorrow’, as Thoreau once wrote. They are useful, can be used as something that inform and improve how we live today, that allow us to navigate that which is difficult, remind us that happiness and love should be sought after and shared while there is still time. There is still time. Perhaps, even now, our regrets will continue to shine light into that shadow world of the past. Today, I wish simply to see you next week, to come again a few weeks later, to look after you a little, to sit and talk a little, to share in the quiet together, to sit bedside as you sleep. Whatever you wish.

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