Legacy Project #1 - Regrets

"My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." ~ Marianne Robinson, Gilead

Regrets are the source of ghastly hauntings as we grow older. Finding my greatest regret has been quite a journey in the past few days.

In the beginning I quickly jotted as many personal regrets as I could at a sitting. I understood the list would never be complete, but figured I'd rank them to unearth which regret I experienced as the mother of them all.

What would such a regret even look like? I scoured the list, and in the process, unearthed a few more of them. Buzzed with an onslaught of incidents that occurred decades ago, along with recent times I might have done better or been better, I looked up the dictionary definition of regret.

Considering the subtleties and shadings of the word helped me more than merely finding a plausible answer. You see, in my darkest hours I can reach into myself and grab a virtual "guilt quilt" to wallow in, thanks to the old Catholic training of my childhood. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. "I am responsible, it is my most grievous sin." The residual shame associated with times I missed the mark was an obstacle I needed to get past in order to find what I was looking for.

The "greatest regret" exercise has forced me to look at the staining over the patches of my guilt quilt. The patches themselves are past experiences based on life circumstances, related to responses to events not always under my direct or conscious control. The stains represent a sticky overlay: shame, blood, sweat, and tears produced by trauma and associated memories that begin with the words, "if only." Some of our worst trials are those we force upon ourselves. Self disregard is a vicious animal.

The quilt itself has its uses. It's part of me, folded and safe in the darkest corner of my inner sanctum, a reminder of my own base humanity. Taken on all at once, the mantle is heavy. Its patches are best examined one at a time, for there are still lessons and oddly, small comforts, even insight, to be found within each.

Consider that even the saints of Catholicism, whose stories are legion, were not perfect humans. In my mind they exist to urge us in the direction of our own possibilities. Were their example not so extreme, maybe we'd forget that humans were created just a "little lower than the angels." (You see Catholicism is difficult to scrub from the soul of one born to it – even one who long ago walked away still returns from time to time to view an artifact or idea from a different perspective.)

The incorruptible physical bodies of a few of its saints, their remains still on view within their glass coffins, serve to hint at our own ultimate survival. We ourselves might retain a semblance of beauty if our grace emerges from just the right place - or something like that. There I go, all Catholic again, but of a different sort, almost wholly ignorant.

So, what is the greatest of all my regrets? It resides at the center of this convoluted story.

My deepest regret is the time I so desperately wanted to be someone other than myself. The event shocked me with its ferocity and made me consider life as I never had before. I was thirteen years old and sitting on my bed contemplating my misshapen big toe (my shoes had always been too tight on my big feet) when I realized I hated my life and I hated my self. I surveyed the vast distance between happy times of the past and the devastation of my particular here-and-now. I'd never seriously considered suicide, but for the first time I understood why some people went through with the act.

That day, my imagination went as far as to conjure possible methods. The one my mother frequently mentioned, putting her head in the gas oven, seemed most painless. Still, I couldn't imagine that or any other method for myself. I lacked the courage it must take to trade the known for that particular level of unknown. So much for faith, I thought. Maybe not acting on the fantasy meant I had too little of it – or maybe too much. That, I don't remember.

One of two grandfathers had recently died. My father's father. A proud redneck kind of guy – he literally showed it off with his open collared shirts - he'd loved me, the first grandchild, first baby girl of the family. From the distance of a truck driver's job, he oversaw the hell of an ever-worsening family situation. Knowing how badly things were headed, he'd started making surprise visits to our home in the middle of the day. I remember him needing to park on a nearby road and walk to our house because mere residential streets couldn't take the burden of the load his rig carried.

He'd died quickly after a liver cancer diagnosis. His wife, my beloved grandmother, thirty-plus miles away and not readily available to me, was dazed with grief when she lost him. I couldn't help either of us. We were lost and prepared for even worse without Grandpa around to drive us to see one another.

By this age I'd grown heavy and bookish, a standout among my peers in the worst way. With his own stern father dead, Dad now freely moved himself around and out of our lives. My alcoholic mother, pregnant with the sixth child, could not care for herself or anyone. My last memory of her final pregnancy was in her eighth month when she chased me with a butcher knife throughout the house. I don't remember why she was so angry. She always was when she drank but this was a whole new level of rage.

My smart mouth and sarcasm was the likely reason. I'd once read a book Dad had brought home during one of his self-improvement phases called "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power." Words were powerful tools for personal advancement, but the tables often turned on me suddenly and this time I found myself almost literally at the point of the blade. I got off pretty easy, having locked myself inside a bedroom, The child she was carrying still pays for Mom's disabilities through the burden of her own understandable struggles.

I was the oldest, physically mature and menstruating since the age of nine. But I was never sure about what to do with myself or the mess we were in. Was I technically a mother now? Did everyone live like this? I had no ideas, no good words for myself. I felt myself to be fundamentally a good person but rejected by virtually all but my grandmother, now so beyond my reach.

Not knowing what to do, lacking the courage or will to do away with myself, I clung to excessive admiration of a classmate, "D," who once was friendly to me, but now was silent. She never joined the bullies, though.

I'd first met her around third grade in Catholic school, which I'd left in sixth grade to attend a public school. Our paths didn't cross again until a few years later. By then, D had blossomed into what I imagined a perfect girl would be: beautiful, feminine, thin, blonde, blue-eyed, mysterious, smart, quiet, and much loved and admired. Her clothes were beautiful, she never wore the same outfit twice in two weeks, and her parents - I presumed they were equally perfect - bought her contacts when not everyone had them. (Did I mention my coke-bottle glasses at the time?)

I wasn't in love with D; I wanted to be her. I carried her image with me everywhere I went, hoping for radical transformation. Eventually I stopped eating and naturally lost weight, a necessity in the days of Twiggy et al in order to be a player on the teen scene. I didn't have a wardrobe but became presentable and even pretty to some. My grandmother found me beautiful, especially when I lightened my hair. I was hungry most of the time. I wasn't D yet, but I imagined myself inching closer.

Flashing ahead through the decades, my life had changed for the better. I eventually learned that D, whom I had once wanted so desperately to trade lives with, had died at an early age and been unhappily married for years. There are few traces of her left, no artifacts such as one might find these days. As I think of her, her grace persists as ever it was. Our paths once crossed, I lost track, and now here she is again. I imagine my arms around her for everything I never knew about her, or myself.

Accepting the totality of my own self remained difficult for me longer than most who know me will ever realize. Recounting our story now, I think of D and the prison of perfection, its graven image and its permutations. I wonder if she had been secretly frightened of people's attention, as I had often been. We might have been able to help one another, once upon a time.

Comparison of self to others is a waste of life and time. Wishing we were free of our own existence is itself a tragedy. My big ugly toe on my thirteen-year-old foot was just another imperfect part to forget about. I see it now as part of a structure that overall held me up, literally, old, ill-fitting plastic shoes notwithstanding. (See what I did there? And yes, the day came I could afford shoes that fit and to this day I appreciate them).

What does this mean in terms of legacy?

In considering the nature of my deepest regret, I ended up in the vicinity of my central wound: that I wasn't enough. I couldn't trust myself. The world was too difficult to fathom. Where did I go wrong?

Well, if the world isn't ordered in a way that makes sense to me, it's not all my fault. This does not render me helpless, nor does it absolve me of accountability and the willingness to do the best I can. Here we arrive at the platitudinous nature of good advice, but the lesson is and will always be in our own examined experiences. Through them, we create a version of a world in which we can abide one day at a time.

The effort to create and cherish one's own self is not a selfish pursuit. I don't ignore pain points, my own or those of others. Most people face up pretty well and even sparkle in the settings in which we first see and get to know one another. Beneath the surface, though, there's so much more.

Some days I am witness to too much, notably when someone has simply given up and gone over, unable to bear the burden of being alive anymore. I speak here of emergencies I've been called to, at hospital or elsewhere. Earlier this year, it was someone I knew.

Which is why I have the sticker shown above in the back window of my car. Those who have been lost are also part of me. I remember them, even those I didn't know in this life personally. Their names are in my book, as I like to say. My own dark memories are folded and currently at rest, but they are there. I remember.

In their darkest days of being human, I wonder if they knew they'd be resurrected this way, that even strangers would acknowledge and register the significance of their lives and their regrets. I sigh as a mother does, but I don't judge. Their memories carry great spiritual power, enabling me to remain energized for whatever comes my way on a given day. Physical presence disappears, but memories, images, stories of a lifetime persist and I gladly carry their legacies with me.

The challenges ahead loom large as one nears the end of a lifetime, but there's only so much we can do. A little effort along with a lot of curiosity and awareness is enough to keep our little world going, right? I don't want to be anybody else, not even a younger version of myself.

For the sake of others coming up behind me in this life: give yourself the attention you'd offer a topic that interests you in an assigned book or movie, or whatever medium commands your interest. Follow the stories of others as you create your own life story. Consider my greatest regret as told here: It all comes to pass; when it's over it's never really over, and what empties into the nether realm is never really gone. Your assignment is to be who you are with the rest of us, and make the most of your time here.

Let your life speak, and let it be uniquely yours. Do your best to understand that you can learn to be well by doing well, for others and absolutely, for yourself.

"Life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness. Some uncomprehended law holds us at the point of contradiction…we do not like that which we love, where good and bad are…impossible to tell apart…where we, broken hearted and ecstatic, can only resolve the conflict by blindly taking it into our own hearts." ~ Frieda Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days