Regrets, I’ve had a slew

God, Thou great symmetry, Who put a biting lust in me From whence my arrows spring, For all the frittered days That I have spent in shapeless ways Give me one perfect thing.                             — Anna Wickham

Earl Fowler

This is about my father after my mother died; my own personal Cloud of Unknowing (or rather, Fog of Insensitivity, Obliviousness and Cluelessness) in the wake of said death; and more generally, our less than heroic agon against the gristle and loam of grief, panic and dread here on the far side of paradise.

Dad was the same age that I am now and pretty much out of his mind after leukemia carried away Mom in her early sixties. Over the three torturous years that the disease relentlessly sucked the life out of her, he did everything he could to make her comfortable and ease her pain.

With his wife suddenly gone after a 41-year marriage, his two sons living in faraway cities and no job to regulate his days after he retired, Dad was lost and disconsolate. Started drinking too much. Spent most of his time revisiting old haunts they both had enjoyed. Booked into old motel rooms where they had stayed. Endlessly reproached himself for not buying her things she wouldn’t have wanted anyway.

It was murder. It was agonizing. It was excruciating. And if you’ve had a parent die and the other one go off the rails, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

On a visit to my childhood home a few years later, I was startled, then delighted, to be introduced to a new woman with whom Dad was “keeping company” (to fall back on the uncharacteristically prissy idiom he used). He was happier than he’d been in years, almost delirious. She was a lovely widow and seemed to really dig him, too.

I’d never heard of her before, but they’d known each other back in the small Prairie village in which they both grew up. Touchstones in common. All to the good.

And that’s when it happened.

I suddenly had the brilliant notion that they would both enjoy seeing my uncle’s 8mm home movies, which by that time had been transferred to a VHS cassette, showing the town as it had been in the Forties and Fifties. You know. For old time’s sake.

And they did, too — there was the old grocery store, there was their old school, there was the church my grandpa helped build —  and suddenly, there was my mom as a young woman at Christmas dinners, vivacious and laughing.

My dad turned pale. His date turned pale. And I felt like an inconsiderate weasel for not anticipating that this would happen. Of course it would, as some part of me surely must have realized before taking on a mission as the gruesome Ghost of Christmas Past.

The inconsiderate weasel flew back to my job in Montreal a day or two later. And the next time I spoke to my father on the phone, I learned that he was no longer seeing the woman with whom he might have enjoyed a thrilling final chapter in both their lives.

Was I responsible for the breakup? He didn’t say so and there might have been other factors of which I’m not aware. There likely were. But had I been unconsciously trying to sabotage a budding romance out of a misguided loyalty to a dead woman who, in any case, only would have wanted her husband to be happy?

I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. But the unthinking, reckless way I blundered into the delicate china shop of their emotions is one of the things that keeps me up at night.

And with that tangible example out of the way, let’s move on to what this essay is about.

No one has described more appositely than Yeats the memories of the awful screwups that haunt us all on wakeful nights. This is from his great poem Vacillation:

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

In her essay “A Drugstore in Winter,” American novelist Cynthia Ozick, now 97, concludes with the sort of contrition and longing for an existential mulligan that might be particularly germane to writers. But on nuits blanches when sleep won’t come, we are all visited by similar … vapours:

Your hair is whitening, you are a well of tears, what you meant to do (beauty and justice) you have not done, papa and mama are under the earth, you live in panic and dread, the future shrinks and darkens, stories are only vapour, your inmost craving is for nothing but an old scarred pen, and what, God knows, is that?

Except for maybe the pen part, we’ve all been there.

Poet Mary Oliver put it a slightly different way: “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

That fundamental question — and, as you get older, the realization that what you meant to do (beauty and justice) you have not done — are recurring fugitives from the mind’s ebb and flow, the meteorology of thought, where hot and cold running phantoms arise unbidden like so many Banquo’s ghosts in Macbeth.

They are the black-and-yellow salamanders that jump out from under the log — from the suppurating slag heap of memory, the smithy of your guilt-ridden conscience, which spews tar and creosote and the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm.

Pick whatever metaphor for this discordant Nachtmusik, this urtext of mental lassitude and thoughtlessness, most appeals to you (or repels you least): Gangrenes of the intellect! Spume of Götterdammerung! Turtles in the churning cistern of consciousness! Mice in the beer!

Ugh.

I have a nightmarish vision wherein all my sins and omissions are espaliered like thorny roses on a rickety trellis-work, and at the centre of the roses are wormy images of all the people I have wronged, peeping out with the tiny faces of Merino sheep through vast bundles of wool and self-deception.

Every adult’s personal Bridge of Sighs rests on parapets of regret, jutting out into the stream of contingency and happenstance below. We wear the chains we forge in life.

And yeah, I’m just messing with you to see how many ridiculous analogies you can bear.

Me and the Sativa gummies.

But what I really want to know is how to come unglued from the mirror? How to still the fractious palm at the end of the mind when every thought is a thought de trop in a bronze decor? How not to become intoxicated by the incense clouds of self-remonstration, as my dear father was?

Delicate Adonis is dying, O Cytherea, what shall we do? Beat your breasts, O maidens, and rend your tunics.

In short, how to unplug the dancing beam of the projector, that cone of consciousness that pierces the darkness like a gold-feathered bird whose gleaming vibrations glance willy-nilly off the face of a traduced friend or the hair of a wronged relative?

Well.

You could see a shrink. Take up jogging. Pass on the Willie Nelson and the Johnnie Walker.

Or you could start by fingering prayer beads and mumbling magical incantations ceaselessly, as some starets advise.“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” or whatever else along those lines works in whatever metaphysical Otherworld turns on your lights. There’s a short two-way street from trance to transcendence and back again.

1 Thessalonians 5:16: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

A technique like that might put your demons to rest, or at least fend them off for as long as you can sustain the effort. Wearing hairshirts or spiked metal cilices while mounting the 99 wooden steps of Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal on your knees might also be effective, at least for the nonce, in taking one’s mind off one’s mind.

Me, I was lucky enough recently to reacquaint myself with the work-centred Stoicism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Concord, who cautions in one of his journals against embracing suffering as a formula for redress or expiation — or for that matter, as a way to simply feel things more deeply: “We court suffering in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp angular peaks and edges of truth. But it is a scene painting, a counterfeit, a goblin.”

In his 1841 essay “Experience,” Emerson offers (sans elaboration) a candid confession: “The only thing grief has taught me, is how shallow it is.”

This could be interpreted as coldness or a lack of empathy, especially since it was written after the deaths of his first wife and his beloved firstborn son, Waldo. But there’s wisdom here as well. A way to cease without praying.

In the long run, we’re all about to be recycled by worms as part of the nitrogen cycle. Why brood, nature writer Edward Hoagland asks himself in his essay collection Sex and the River Styx, about failed marriages, lapsed friendships, ex-lovers, past mistakes? If we’re all about to be forgotten in the duff, “why, then, care so much about the moral timbre of the life I’ve led?”

Hoagland is 92 now, about as sagacious as a person can get, and admits he still doesn’t have a good answer.

But whether or not there is one, there’s no point dwelling on captious and cavilling internal Yelp reviews of past indiscretions and moral turpitude which, like Chekhov’s gun, are always waiting to go off in our heads at 3 a.m. (I mean, so long as we’re mixing metaphors like a head on fire.)

Lady Macbeth had it figured. Wielding the dagger that her husband might have seen before him, Lady M slashed all this verbiage to the more economical but sadly bromidic: “What’s done is done.” All we can do is move on, learn from our mistakes and try to do better next time.

Now for the $64,000 Question. If we had a chance to do it all again, only this time without making such utter asses of ourselves, tell me: Would we, could we?

The Ruffian writer Ian Leslie made an interesting point recently in an article posted on Substack and titled “27 Notes on Growing Old(er)”:

People who know they’re approaching the last stop aren’t wiser than the rest of us, they’re just even more self-deluded than we are. I recently listened to an interview with the entrepreneur/self-help guru Alex Hormozi. I liked what he said about those “deathbed regrets” which get spun into cute homilies — I wish I’d stopped to smell the roses, I wish I’d seen more of my children, and so on:

The human condition is that we want it all, and we’re not willing to make trades … ‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path — the path they could have taken — without considering the cost of that path. So they say, “Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.” It’s like, well yeah, but you didn’t, because you actually chose the path that you’re on, and you weren’t willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.

Given a second kick at the can, a lot of us would behave in precisely the same cruel or avaricious manner that our better selves lament when waiting for the Sandman to show. Mind you, if you find yourself sleepwalking on one of these nights, one of these crazy old nights, best not to exclaim: “Out, damned spot!”

Once the blood has been spotted on one’s hands, the wick of equability can be consumed completely by the flame of doomed attempts to find what architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable has called “closure, that solipsism that Americans use to replace grief.”

One could take more solace in the prayerful meditation with which I opened this piece if the feisty author — who once threw Dylan Thomas out of her house during a raging snowstorm — hadn’t hanged herself.

My advice? When all else fails, try stealing a page from Tolstoy’s Pierre at the end of War and Peace, who wanders away from a dinner party to stare at the night sky. On a clear night away from the glare of the city, especially when the moon is new and the Milky Way resplendent, it’s our one perfect thing.

We emerged to see — once more — the stars.

                                                   — Dante, Inferno