What is a regret?

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Aiko: regret is a negative conscious and emotional reaction to personal past acts and behaviors. It involves feeling sad, repentant, or disappointed over something one has done or failed to do.

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How do we know when to feel regret over a past behavior (or lack of one)?

 

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Is a regret something we would have done differently if we knew then what we know today?

 

No, it has to be more than that. Looking back over my life there are thousands of things I would have done differently given what I know today. That just means that I have been learning and growing, something to be proud of and happy about rather than something to regret.

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But what "more" is it? 

 

I think that I can honestly (and accurately) say that, given what I knew then and was aware of then, given the glasses that I was wearing when I made all those different choices in my life before (that knowing what I know today I would have done differently), the choice that I made then made perfect sense at that time. In addition, I would debate with anyone that the same was true for them for any past choices that they say they now think they should regret.

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Given the fact that we all made the best choices we could at the time we made them in the past, why would we ever criticize our former selves for having made those choices? Why would we do Monday morning quarterbacking against ourselves?

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The reason we do it is the same reason that we criticize ourselves and feel guilty about anything

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It helps us feel "safer" by beating others to the possible punch and trying to prove to others (if only in our mind) that we're not such a bad person because we feel bad about what we did or didn't do. See Undoing guilt.

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Back to the headline "My Life Regrets" 

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If I were going to feel guilty about anything, it would be about a decision that I made quickly and carelessly (as judged in retrospect) in 1979.

 

I am sharing the following two "regrets" with you as if I were blaming myself.

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I sentenced my mother, the most important person in my life, to five more years of misery 

 

​In 1979 at a family reunion at my sister's place in Colorado, my mother, after living with a man that she didn't love and didn't respect for 36 years (and who was bipolar), finally made a firm decision that she was going to leave my father. She was so happy and so was I.

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But a few months after my parents had returned to Tennessee and I had returned to Arizona, I heard nothing further from my mother about this. It seemed she was continuing to stay with him. At the time I thought, "Well, that's her business. I shouldn't intrude." Later I found out what a mistake that was.

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After five additional miserable years with my father, even getting herself more financially entangled with him, she finally did leave him. It was only then that I learned that, after that family union five years earlier and my mother had returned to her home in Tennessee, she had told her mother, "I'm going to leave Jack." Her mother replied, "Dorothy, you can't do that. He needs you." Instantly all the sense of hope and excitement was destroyed because my mother thought she couldn't bear her mother's disapproval.

 

She continued to live a life of tolerating my father for five more years, all out of the fear that her mother and maybe others would blame her for abandoning such a needy person as my father was.

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My mistake was, even though I cannot know this for sure, I believe that if I had called my mother back then in 1979 and asked her what had happened that she seemed to have changed her mind regarding leaving my father, I could have helped her see things more clearly and then she would have then left my father then and had five more happy years in her life that she didn't get to have because I was a coward and I was trying to be too "nice." I'll never forgive myself for that after all the things my mother did for me.

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A second regret with my father that places a distant second behind my regret with my mother

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In 1991 my father was dying.

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In the summer of 1984, my mother, having finally reached the end of her rope in being able to live with my father, made a firm decision to leave him, even though she had little idea of how she was going to do it. Married for over 40 years, their life was quite entangled. I flew from Arizona to Tennessee (they lived 50 miles north of Chattanooga near Sewanee) to assist her in going through the process. Knowing that my father would never agree to move out of their home, my mother decided to temporarily move to Arizona where we three children were living. Already being somewhat aware of the difficulties in my mother's marriage, my uncle Art and his wife Christine, who lived nearby, agreed to temporarily take over the caretaking of my grandmother Beebe (she did not object this time to my mother leaving my father). 

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Living in Arizona

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After two weeks of staying with my wife Louise and me in Phoenix, my mother and my brother Ray rented an apartment together in Phoenix right next door to an apartment where my sister Karen, her husband Sven, and my niece Sarah were living.

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Nobody knew how long my father was going to continue to occupy their home in Tennessee. My mother was a nurse, but her license in Tennessee did not permit her to work in Arizona. Given her fear of becoming a "bag lady," she got a job cleaning houses. 

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After living eight months in Arizona, my mother learned through her friends in Tennessee that my father had left their home and moved to another state (my father had never developed any friends of his own in Tennessee). She returned to her home in Tennessee and to caring for her mother.

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Lawyering up (and down)

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Both my mother and father retained respective divorce lawyers. One day my father called me, asking if I would be willing to mediate their divorce since the lawyers were going to eat up most of their joint assets otherwise. I told him, assuming that my mother was agreeable, that I would mediate with the understanding that neither of them would talk with each other: everything would go through me. Given the hostility and defensiveness both my parents had toward each other, it could never work if they communicated directly with each other. When I spoke with my mother, she agreed that it was a good idea.

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Alternating back and forth between calls with my parents, step by step, we three were able to come to a property settlement agreement and got it signed and implemented.

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My father's second wife

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Not long after the divorce papers had been finalized between my mother and father, I learned from my father that he had remarried and was living in Missouri. He invited me to visit with him and his new wife Mabel. 

 

At one time during my three-day visit with them, Mabel was complaining to me about my father doing this or that. From what I remember, she said he had taken some things that belonged to her. I wanted my father's marriage to last as long as possible. During a walk together around the neighborhood, as diplomatically as I could, I shared with him my concerns that his wife was not so happy with him. In short, he told me to mind my own business and he could handle it.

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I learned a few months later that his marriage to Mabel lasted six months.

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My father's third wife

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Her name was June Tuttle. You could say she was the woman behind the man, except that the man she was behind was Merlin Tuttle, Phd, her son. He is the founder of Bat Conversation International, has been featured in numerous articles in National Geographic Magazine and many other publications, and continues to this day to be active in the area of understanding and spreading the good word about bats. During Merlin's childhood June encouraged and supported him in his early fascination with bats. One intriguing fact I learned from Merlin, when I met him in Austin, Texas for my father's marriage to his mother, is that of the 6400 known species of mammals on this earth, about 1400 of those different species are bats.

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Let me back up. My father grew up in Austin, Texas. His sister Mary, still living in Texas after all these years, introduced my father to her friend June. My father proposed to June and, after a bit of convincing, June agreed. My father invited me and my wife Louise to attend their small wedding. We flew from Phoenix to Austin for the occasion. 

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During our two-day stay there, at one point, maybe to try to alleviate a feeling of possible guilt, I confided in Arden, June's younger son, a concern that June was probably not aware of how difficult my father could be to live with. Arden brushed off my concern with, "Given how terrible her marriage was with our father, I don't think that marriage to your father could be that bad." I felt a bit of relief thinking, "I tried." I knew my father was not a violent man...that was not an issue. I remembered one thing my mother said to me after she finally left my father, "I wish he had hit me. Then I would have had the excuse to leave him much earlier."

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June's at her wit's end

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About 18 months later, June and my father were visiting Louise and me in Arizona. My father was in one of his manic won't-stop-talking bipolar phases. June was at her wit's end and was asking Louise and me for advice. We were even thinking about trying to get him into the psychiatric ward of a VA hospital. In the end, June said, "I can't do that to him." Part of her decision to stay with him was based upon the fact that it seemed that he would not live too much longer. She could tough it out.

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The last time I saw my father

 

About six months later June gave me a call to let me know that she thought my father had only a few weeks left. If I wanted to see him, now was the time. Although they lived in a nearby state, between flights and rental car, it was a good twelve hours to get to their place. I stayed there for three days. June's daughter was also there, helping out. My father and I were able to share some sense of connection and love. He was feeling a lot of pain in his thoracic area. On occasion he would ask me to stand over him as he was sitting down and to pull up on his left arm as hard as I could. He told me that this helped to relieve the pain.

 

As I was saying goodbye to my father as we sat out on the front porch of the house they were staying in, I remember thinking that I had said everything I needed to say to him and that we would probably never see each other again. I felt complete. As I left, he said to me, "Take care, son."

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Three weeks later

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June called me. She, Arden, and her daughter were with my father at a hospital in some bigger city. She told me she thought he had a day or less, just in case I wanted to be there when he died.

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At that time, I was quite aware of assessing whether I would regret not being there when he died and felt fairly certain that I would not. I also reassured myself that his new family was there for him and that I was "unneeded."

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I now regret that I was not with him when he died

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And I want to say "sorry" to you, my father. And I know that where you are now you can understand and accept everything that I did or didn't do.

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June and my mother became good friends

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After my father died, June contacted my mother to let her know that she had found some personal things that belonged to my mother that my father had taken with him when he abandoned their home in Tennessee. My mother was touched and grateful that June thought of her and June was able to ship those items back to my mother.

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They talked on the phone from time to time, sharing each other's stories about their time with my father. I suspect this was important to have one other person in the world who could understand how difficult that it had been to be with this man in a way that no other person ever could.