I lost a friend who meant everything to me. I don’t like to say that, or think it, because still I hold on to the memory of our relationship and think that someday we could build it again. But the truth I don’t like to admit is that the relationship we had—precious, magical—isn’t currently cradled between us and may never be again.
“I regret,” I told Mom. “I regret so much.”
Regret is like shame, the thing I learned about when I took counseling classes. Shame is a dirty thing, red and smelly, with an odor that lingers in the room long after the source is gone. You don’t know where it comes from, shame. You don’t know how to fix it.
This is also regret.
Shame and regret are different from guilt and repentance, which are bright and sharp as needled knives, thrown straight from the arm of the Holy Spirit. Guilt for specific actions and the 180-degree turnaround we call repentance are clear, defining states that keep us accountable and change our lives for the better.
Regret is nothing. You cannot pin down what is wrong. It is not helpful.
“I do not want you to regret,” Mom said. She went back into her bedroom and came out with an old Reader’s Digest, large print. “Read this.” She showed me an article called “What I Learned at the Flower Shop,” by Alisha Gorder. You can read it online, where it was first printed in The New York Times under the title, “One Bouquet of Fleeting Beauty, Please.”
I like the Reader’s Digest title better. It was solid and stodgy at a time when I needed solid and stodgy. It helped me to read the article in light of what I could take from it for my own life. I took this:
“After he died, I thought of his death as something that had happened to me, an act committed specifically with me in mind because of something I had or had not done, and it took me years to break free from this habit.”
And this:
“I no longer wore his old T-shirts to bed and had given up on finding answers to impossible questions, most of which were versions of the relentless, ‘What could I have done?’ There was always something, but at the same time, absolutely nothing, and I had learned to live with that.”
Ms. Gorder wrote of a suicide; mine is only a failed friendship. Still, I’ve asked those same questions. Always, the failure is my fault, and I suppose that is not only wrong, but conceited.
Ms. Gorder taught me something about letting go of the past while cradling its beauty. Releasing a friend while treasuring the friendship.
***
Photo by Giulia Bertelli on Unsplash
My husband read a poem years ago about a train called regret…..that it would take you no where fast.
I’ve tried to find it but have had no success. But I think about it.
I like to think of regret as a temporary space, like a vestibule or waiting room, releasing me into a room where I find hope.
Hoping the best for you, Luci!
Tough times!
Ms. Gorder is a smart woman. It is painful to lose a friend, but you can hold onto and embrace what you had, treasure it for what it was and move forward. I truly believe that some times God has a hand in who comes into our lives and who is taken out of our lives. I am in my senior years and as I look back at the people who have remained in my life and those who were only in my life for a short time I have come to realize that I learned something from each relationship and none of it was for not.
Regret has no power but it reminds us of our fallibility. This is a good thing when we walk in humility and remember that we need God in every aspect of our lives. As with grief, regret becomes a part of us but does not take dominance. I know that I need to keep my eyes up and forward, not denying the hard and painful but looking for joy and hope – it is there!
Part of a beautiful song rings through my mind, “Show me Thy face…the fretting ghosts of vain regret shall haunt my soul no more” (Hymns of the Church # 653). May you find healing!