A blue striped fabric covered notebook with letters spelling “Poetry” sat on a little bookcase in my parents bedroom when I was growing up. I looked at it once but didn’t pay that much attention. It had a lot of clippings of poems and articles that my mother had found worth keeping and it had some poetry she had written, mostly about being a young mother to her toddler son.
Years later, my parents by then in assisted living, I was at their home gathering some things and came across that notebook again. This time I was captured by it. It was apparent as she aged, dealt with the aging and and dying of friends and family, she had begun to write about loss, grief, death. I pondered, and ponder still, what she was going through when she wrote “If grief is part of death, guilt is is twin.”
I imagine situations she might have been addressing. She was away at college when her father’s cancer overtook him. Was she regretting she wasn’t home at the time? In the aftermath she rather quickly married my father. Did she feel she abandoned her widowed mother? Her youngest brother was only nine at the time. He never really got his life off the ground and years later died of what was deemed a heart attack. Another of my mother’s brothers suspected the diagnosis perhaps masked actual suicide by overdosing himself, as he had been quite depressed. Was that something she felt guilt about?
However, I imagine one situation that may well have been the primary focus was related to her mother. My grandmother lived 90 miles away and my recollection is Mother drove up one weekend a month to be with her. Their relationship was a difficult one as I observed it. My grandmother had objected to my mother’s marriage to my father. There was always a sense of tension that remained. What guilt might she have carried about that after my grandmother died? (Curiously, my grandmother died on my parents’ wedding anniversary).
I can certainly identify with her phrase about guilt being twin to grief. I wrestled for months about how to be useful to my parents when I was 900 miles away and in private practice, where time away was lost income. I settled on flying every six weeks for long weekends. But in the years following I hashed and rehashed what I might have done differently. I have seen many people experience some version of this….what if?….if only….
When I searched for a good quote about guilt, I found so many thoughtful ones that I determined I should share them all. If guilt is something you have ever lived with, and especially if it lingers with you now, consider these:
- “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” – Voltaire
- “There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.” – Unknown
- “Guilt is always hungry; don’t let it consume you. Terri Guillemets
- “When thinking about life, remember this: no amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of anxiety can change the future. We cannot change the past, but we can change our attitude toward it.” – Maya Angelou
The invitation is open to share two cups of tea anytime at Hope’s Café or anywhere you share companionship and conversation.
May we bearers of hope, the “wait staff” at Hope’s Café, for each other and all those we encounter. Shalom, Kate
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