I’ve been reading Jake Seliger’s post about regrets tonight. He’s dying of cancer, which is hardly an enviable position. Cancer killed my father, and it may kill me as well depending on the genetic hand I had been dealt, my access to preventative medicine, etc.
He has quite a few regrets. Some of them are even reasonable, but I can’t help but think that his post is as maudlin as the worst of mine. I’m glad I’m not in a position to speak to him in person, because I would be strongly tempted to ask him one outrageously rude question.
What good are any of these regrets? Are they not a waste of what little time remains to Seliger? Soon enough all of his regrets will be just like his thoughts, his memories, his hopes, and his emotions. They’ll be nothing but tears in rain.
I’m sure my father had regrets, too. Regrets for things done, things undone, things said, and things unsaid. What good were any of them? He could not have changed any of it. Even if he could have done so, it would have changed him in turn.
What I’m seeing in Seliger’s post is a vain wish. He wishes he had been a different man and lived a different life. The life he had been given, the life he had made for himself, does not satisfy him. Nevertheless, it’s the only life he’s going to get. It’s the only life any of us are going to get. What good does it do to regret roads not taken and lives not lived?
Even worse, some of Jake Seliger’s regrets involve decisions that were not wholly his to make. Others strike me as needless confirmity, if not arrant foolishness. And some could probably be described as, “it made sense at the time”.
There is one, in particular, that seems to demand comment.
Not looking into that thing on my tongue in July 2022, when I first noticed it, but that is very specific to me and probably not generalizable.
No, this is generalizable as fuck. If you notice something weird about your body, something that wasn’t there before, and you can afford to do so, you should get your ass to a doctor and insist on having it checked out.
If I had let my wife ignore the lump I found in her breast I might have become a widower in my early forties. She’s alive and five years cancer-free because we caught the growth early and did something about it. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t cheap, but I don’t regret the struggle or the expense.
Seliger, however, is dying at an unnecessarily early age because he chose not to get medical care he could easily afford to access. That is entirely on him and it’s the one choice he is right to regret.
In fairness, Seliger has the following to say:
Reading through these, I realize that a lot of them are more about my generation than me as an individual: I made a lot of the same dumb mistakes a lot of other people made. When I was young, I thought I was different, and totally in control of my own destiny—and everyone else probably thought so too. And yet it turns out that I erred in extremely common, boring ways.
I never thought I was wholly in control of my own destiny. I knew that my choices were constrained not only by my previous choices, but the choices everybody else around me made, going all the way back to the Paleolithic period. Nevertheless, I did the best I could at the time. I’m still doing the best I can.
I intend to continue doing the best I can, knowing all along that I will never know if my choices have turned out for the best, or if perhaps I could have made a better choice at some point along the way. Regrets? Sure, I’ve got a few of my own. But I’ve wasted enough time on them; dwelling on what I might have done doesn’t change what I have done.
Perhaps what Jake Seliger wants most is to be forgiven, but he hasn’t realized that the only person who can forgive him is himself. His wife can’t do it. His family can’t do it. His friends can’t do it. His God can’t do it. He’s got to do it himself, for himself.
He might want to do it soon, for his own sake and that of the people he’s going to leave behind. But if he doesn’t, he’ll soon be beyond caring. All debts are paid once the ship leaves port, especially the one on which Charon serves as helmsman.