Grief and the Tale of My First Regret
It’s been awhile since I’ve written here. It seems when life gives me a period of time in which endless happenings occur, there isn’t much room to express my creativity. Many of the things that have happened in the past year were sad, followed by a surprisingly good period, then back again. This juxtaposition is confusing to me, as if life wants to communicate its duality in full force. In this expanse of time, I have made some realizations, and it is this: the longer one lives, mountains of “what ifs” begin to grow. If we’re not careful, oceans of “I wish” can swallow us whole too.
I used to say, live life with no regrets. I lived this well. I didn’t have any regrets until my father died a few years ago. Regrets that weren’t entirely my fault. Since childhood I questioned, how could I make my dad love me more, see me more, be proud of me more? I’ve dealt with the grief of never being able to say these things before his death, the kind of grief that didn’t have as much sadness as I thought it would. Instead, it had anger, more resentment, more complex processes that led me to learning the most difficult thing in my life: forgiveness.
The hardship of this might have contributed to my illnesses. Stress is said to be one of the biggest contributing factors to disease, and if not a contributing feature, definitely an exacerbating trigger. After his death, I…
