Good Mourning Grief

A blog about my adventures as a grief warrior

Tag: #regrets

Regrets That Masquerade

June 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

My wish, when I turned thirty, was to have fewer regrets in my next thirty than I did in my first thirty years. I felt I failed. When I look back on my first thirty years, the regrets I had are so small compared to the regrets in adulthood, specifically motherhood. In my first thirty years I was young, learning, supposed to make mistakes. After thirty, you are expected to be grown up and raising the next generation so one better be complicated free. Yes, I realize this is unrealistic; idealistic expectations are the doorway to regret. I read the posts about how your first born ‘grew up’ with you as you learned to parent. Your second one shares with you a sense of freedom or adventure you wish for. Both are true for me.

Regrets can be powerful teachers in the lessons of life. In grief, they can also become a trap that snares any chance of healing.  Exploring what is a regret, my list includes things that have happened that I had control of and some I had no control of. So, are they all regrets?  I regret not putting a tire swing on the tree for the kids. Why? They had lots; the lack of a tree swing did not alter their development. Get over it. I regret moving to a new community albeit we returned.  So, mistake fixed. I regret telling Zane to go and enjoy that night he was killed. I think the things that I say I regret are the things I will never know if they were the decisions that forged the path to where I now travel on.

Pondering my feelings, meditating with my angels, as I often do, I came across a quote. “Regret is the only wound the soul does not recover from.” Could this be why I feel stuck? It encouraged me to think about if what I am feeling is regret (I was in control) or disappointment (out of my control). Then I read the author of this quote was Sarah Ban Breathnack.  She wrote Simple Abundance, a book I read over and over, and that Zane knows is my all time favorite. And I knew that her quote came to me, through Zane. Perhaps it is not regret that I am feeling, perhaps the emotion is disappointment.

Regrets are all the things said or unsaid, done or undone that we no longer have a chance to fix. Or at least we feel we have no chance. And sometimes we don’t. And I think that is where disappointment lies.  Part of grieving is that your heart explores every corner, every aspect of what might have been done differently to not have ended up here. The truth settles into your soul disguised as regret, but really it is disappointment of what we wished was to be is not ever to be.

In the end, the answer is always one could have done more. Death takes that away. The quote sent to me is a reminder that if I wish my soul to heal, I must understand that I have no real regrets. I used the daily strength given to me to do my best. With that, whatever came to be, it cannot become a regret chained to me to cause more angst. The regrets I thought I carried are just disappointments that I did not have more time, more experiences with those I love.

Examining the ‘What Ifs’

December 6, 2020 /

This past week a neighbor lost her 36 year old daughter to a diabetic complication.  As we all do,  she is experiencing anger.  We want to blame something or someone for this terrible injustice.  She believes that if our current times were different, she would have been visiting her daughter more and would have been able to support her better, avoiding this outcome.  It is the beginning of her ‘what ifs’.

My ‘what ifs’ with Zane are long and complicated. What if I had listened to his fears more?  What if I had insisted he not go out? What if he had stayed there a little longer? What if I had sent him to school away from here? What if….and each time a ‘what if’ comes up, it brings with it a gut wrenching agony. 

 ‘What ifs’ are about examining what control we might have had and why we didn’t exercise it then that we might not be here now.  ‘What ifs’ are all about how things might have turned out differently.  The problem with ‘what ifs’ is that they can’t be answered. We don’t know.  We will never know. So the possible outcomes of the ‘what ifs’ only create regrets or exaggerate a regret we already had.  And regrets complicate grief.

So how do we stop the ‘what if’ scenarios that play over and over again?  I believe you can’t and I also believe that sometimes facing the pain of the ‘what ifs’ can bring a little healing.

Some ‘what ifs’ we face are about things we couldn’t control in the first place.  What if I had insisted he not go out?  He was 26; he would have called me cute and told me he was going. By facing this ‘what if’ and understanding this was never in my control, I can let it go.  I am so sad that he chose to go out that night, but why shouldn’t he have?  He was enjoying a beautiful night with a beautiful friend. If they hadn’t been killed, I would have wanted this night to happen for him.  There would have been no ‘what if’.

What if I had sent him to school?  I don’t know his life plan.  This ‘what if’ understanding is powerful.  Only God knows the plan and thus many of our ‘what ifs’ are known by God, the Universe, whatever your higher power belief is. So a bigger picture is in place; one that we don’t see or understand in our grief.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I try not to soak in the ‘what ifs’ because there are no answers. If I do go there, I ask myself, do I know for certain that ‘what if’ would have kept him alive?  No.  My ego may think it can, but the truth is, I will never know. So I shift my thinking to what I do know. I think of all the things I did do, we did have and my mind begins to move on to more pleasant memories of our life together.

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