thoughts about love, and about regret.

February 15, 2013 in General

My parents got married on this date 60 years ago.

My dad only lived to see 27 of those years, but every year we quietly mark what might have been, could have been. There is a hole where that particular form of happiness and completeness would be. Here’s to the kind of love that makes pain possible. Here’s to understanding after all these years that death ends a life, not a relationship. Here’s to owning our own grief and loss, to embracing what is, honoring what was, and loving what will be.

My father missed seeing me become an adult. He missed my college graduation. He missed seeing me fall in love, get married, have his grandchildren. He missed so much. And my mother and brother missed him being there for all their milestones, and much more. And yet, we’ve carried him with us everywhere we have gone.

The first Thursday of every month in 2013, I’m hosting a “First Thursday Chat” on my Facebook page. We gather to chat as a community about a different question each month. In February, our discussion centered around this question: “For what or for whom do you grieve?”

My friend Shelley Drabik reflected to me afterward something I believe so important for us to recognize: “To me, grief, fear, and regret are very different and distinct states: grief will diminish (emotional reaction to loss recedes as the vacancy becomes part of the new normal), fear can be overcome (action disproves the assumptions that cause the fear), but regret is often merely suppressed (because it is linked to an intentional bad choice that can’t be undone). Healing one’s soul from the stain of intentional wrongdoing may be impossible for someone with enough of a soul to feel true regret.”

Regret can come in waves over us for the slightest misstep. My mother still wishes that she had said “yes” instead of “no” when my father asked her for a piece of Shoney’s strawberry pie during his last hospital stay. He died the next day. That piece of pie holds a heartful of regret in it.

I think regret is one of the most powerful human emotions.

What do you think? Leave a comment below so we can learn as a community.

Love,

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

21 comments to " thoughts about love, and about regret. "

  • Reply
    sally
    February 15, 2013 AT 12:41PM

    Your momma looks so much like you! My parents were married on February 13, a year after yours. I try not to regret, but it sneaks in, mostly about times when I have not been generous and kind, the way I want to be. And also, about that time in Australia in 1983 when a beautiful boy asked me to spend the night on an island beach with him. Kinda wish I’d done that.

  • Reply
    Beth Cooper-Zobott
    February 15, 2013 AT 12:41PM

    The wedding photo of your mom could have been a photo of you. You look so much like her. Agree that regret is one of the most powerful emotions. Wondering if regret is more powerful/stronger/more erosive to the psyche when it is for something that one has done, or something that one has not done.

  • Reply
    Laura
    February 15, 2013 AT 12:46PM

    I regret not kissing my grandmother goodnight as I left her in hospital on Tuesday night. she died less than half an hour later.
    my hero, my favourite person in the world, the hole she leaves is too vast to fill but I’m grateful she no longer suffers and is at peace. Laura
    http://www.thinking-about-leaving.blogspot.co.uk

  • Reply
    Kimberly Shepherd
    February 15, 2013 AT 1:13PM

    Regret for me is not always about an intentional bad choice. Sometimes it’s about not choosing or acting, which may or may not have been intentional. Regret does sting more, because it feels as though one may have been able to create a different outcome (in some small way) than the current one. Grief doesn’t sting for me, it gnaws. Regret is definitely very powerful, and we can feed it, making it far more powerful.

    • Reply
      Patti Digh
      February 15, 2013 AT 3:56PM

      I am not sure of the intentional bad choice framing either – or in the moment, those choices don’t seem intentional; perhaps that’s it. And yes, we can choose to feed it or not.

  • Reply
    Kathryn Antyr Costa
    February 15, 2013 AT 1:23PM

    Hi Patti,

    I think there comes a time in each of our lives that we must make peace with those things that we regret doing or not doing. Regret is about living in the past and not in the present moment. There are so many things that I had once regretted, mostly disappointing myself. There is too much life to live, so much to experience to be stuck in the past.

    Great thought provoking question.
    Thanks!
    Kathryn

  • Reply
    Sarah Love
    February 15, 2013 AT 1:46PM

    I think one of the worst parts of regret is the belief that our present lives would be different, much better, perfect even, had we not chosen to ________. Or even that things would’ve turned out differently. Regret carries with it this sense of desperation, this longing for things to be not as they are, and shame. Maybe it’s regret that keeps us from feeling the fear and grief we need to feel in order to move through things.

  • Reply
    Liz Marco
    February 15, 2013 AT 2:21PM

    It seems to me that grief, fear and regret are interrelated. I regret decisions made in the past, have grieved over the fallout left by them and have fear because the faith I had in myself to make good choices is gone…especially after a life time of bad choices. I’m not a bad person. I’m referring to marrying the wrong man, divorcing him, selling my beloved farm. Literally leaving a place that was my heart’s home. I can’t go back and yet am frozen in place because of the fear of ending up in another bad place emotionally. In my experience one leads to another. They reach for each other with outstretched hands and dance within you, trampling your spirit with dirty shoes. They are powerful. It’s hard to get up when something so heavy is stepping on your soul.

  • Reply
    Chris McLaughlin
    February 15, 2013 AT 2:22PM

    I don’t know: “intentional wrongdoing” seems pretty harsh for withholding a piece of pie. I can think of so many reasons a distraught wife might do that. My mother would have because she believed her job was to police my dad’s diet in order to make him live longer, and to the very end that would have been her motivator. To the very end she hoped he would not go, and she could food-police and otherwise care him into good health again.

    My regrets are often ambivalent, regret for harm I inflicted mixed with the knowledge that if I had not done this thing or that thing, other harms would have erupted along the way. Everything “bad” I ever did came from years and years of denying myself, of failing to take ANY steps because of fearing missteps.

    Regret can come from lack of courage. Ignorance, Overwhelming circumstances. It’s powerful, yes. But the kind of intentionality behind it is as often misguided or desperate as sinful.

    • Reply
      Patti Digh
      February 15, 2013 AT 3:52PM

      Thanks, Chris. Yes, definitely don’t see the pie as intentional wrongdoing. Sorry if it seemed that way. And your description of your mom’s intentions were exactly my own mother’s at the time. Thanks for your very powerful reflection about regret and courage.

  • Reply
    Nicole Thomas
    February 15, 2013 AT 5:53PM

    First- you look so much like your mom. What a wonderful picture of your parents.

    This is a really wonderful idea- I’ve been dealing with a big ball of regret the last few months. My sister died in october due to complications from alcoholism and I have been dealing with my guilt, anger etc, etc. You know the song, you just can’t dance to it.

    Wrote a blog after it happened if anyone is bored: http://treefroggirl.tumblr.com/post/33664383911/the-duke-of-earl-wont-go-to-rehab

    What is difficult now is knowing that if I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t change a thing, but that doesn’t stop me from beating myself up.

  • Reply
    Ruth
    February 15, 2013 AT 11:24PM

    Although it is Friday, I am catching up. Every day I regret my part in my failed first marriage. I grieve for the loss of my best friend, my first true love, the years of exploring, learning, loving and laughing. We were married for more than nine years and divorced for more than 30 years. I stopped trying. He stopped trying. I lost something wonderful and I regret and I grieve.

  • Reply
    Lila Wells
    February 17, 2013 AT 10:43AM

    For me, regret seems to be synonymous with guilt: both are states/emotions I have been fortunate not to have felt very often, and when I do, I just stop and focus on something else. Not that I haven’t done a lot of things, made a lot of choices, that I wish I could undo. Sometimes I wonder if my conscience works as it should. Or is it that I have the ability to forgive myself instantly for my poor decisions? Whatever the reason, I am SO grateful for it, and for the peace of mind that comes with that forgiveness.

  • Reply
    evokative shane
    February 18, 2013 AT 9:15AM

    All of this, from the concepts of grief, fear, regret, to the strawberry pie, to the comments and back again, are profound words. Small things, perhaps in the continuum of living, but all significant to our beings and our souls. Having lost a dear friend less than a week ago, and listening to her daughter, husband, and the caregivers for her, the words here help me make sense of all that is swirling amidst her loss. My grief is full, but small compared to all that they are living through. Thank you, Patti, and all who commented. It seems that these timely postings are gems meant for me to find.

  • Reply
    Penny Stephens Simms
    February 23, 2013 AT 6:36PM

    I am trying to let go of regret in my life whenever possible, it brings me down and never makes me feel better… I wrote something about grief a while back and I wanted to share a small piece of it: “Time is all that can soothe our grief, time forces the healing even as we sometimes try to fight against it and stay in the pain because the pain is familiar. The unfamiliar is frightening… Time moves us forward, it allows us to breathe again and find new joys and sorrows, new laughter and love. Time is God’s gift to the broken hearted if we can just sit quietly in the moment of our sadness and feel it. The sun always rises after a dark night and I can feel its warmth on my skin even now….it is coming, I know it is.”

    :) Penny Simms

  • Reply
    Katherine Langford
    March 19, 2013 AT 7:20PM

    My father was adamant about a church wedding and I wanted a small wedding at a beautiful garden. I didn’t want my parents to have such an expense and I knew I was marrying the right person no matter where we exchanged vows. He argued and I gave in – I am so glad that I did as my father died before I had been married a year. In fact, we took my mother on our first year anniversary dinner. Lovingly took her to celebrate family and to share our joy in the face of her sorrow. We had a wonderful time, a memorable time, a time that I treasure. I felt my father’s presence with us that night too and it gave me joy as did it give my mother joy. Who would know that my father would die at 54? He was healthy. We thought he was healthy. Not. No one knows what may come or does come and I am glad I acquiesced to his desire for a church wedding. We kept it simple, but it was still more than I wanted. I like looking back without regrets and this one choice has changed how I live my life. Simply. My mother is a large part of our life still and she remarried eventually and another man enjoyed seeing our son grow up into a man. He brought my mother love again and she blossomed because love just is the best soul fertilizer. I helped my stepfather cross over two years ago with my mother and we shared death yet again. She trusted me as I had been with my best friend when she died. Death is just a passage. Love is part of that passage. I would hope that my understanding of living is based on the simple truth of trust — either trust in another’s gut desires or one’s own trust and my father must have known as he said that it was the highlight of his life to see me on that day. He beamed and made my wedding a special celebration. That was 34 years ago May 4th of this year. Yes, we will take my mom with us. It is just part of the whole spinning joy of our lives together either here or in a realm we know exists, but cannot yet see.

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