It’s amazing the things we regret when we lose someone. I don’t mean the macro things, like them being the breadwinner, but little things that nag and haunt us, like maybe we could have been more caring or giving. I know one lady who remembers that her boyfriend had asked her to make him some oatmeal porridge and she hadn’t done it. For some reason I was thinking about this the other day, the whole matter of regrets. Later that evening I happened to catch the tail end of an interview done by ABC’s Diane Sawyers with the mother of Jacyee Dugard, the girl who had been kidnapped and held for 18 years by a sex offender. And one of the things the mother said at the very end, was that on the morning that her daughter was kidnapped, she had been late for work and didn’t turn back to kiss her daughters. She thought about that for 18 years and even at this stage it is still an emotional trigger for her.
There aren’t many things that I personally regret, and in fact I am happy that the last words my son ever said to me at the end of a phone conversation were ‘Thanks Mom, I love you’. It’s kind of pathetic how much comfort I have taken from that memory.
So, I guess the lesson I have learned, even though I sometimes forget, is that we really need to treat the people we love as if they were going to die tonight. Not only because some of them are, but also because, in the end, the memories are all we have.
