Once, and Never More

When I was young, as did most people when they were young, I often thought about what my life would be like someday.   When I got older, as do most people when they get older, I began to realize my life was very much unlike the hopes that once hung bright in my mind's eye.

In many ways, my life is better than the dreams of ten-year-old me:  One simply can't know the pride and the joy and the profound love of having children, by simply imagining it.  One can't know the spectacular depth and comforting security of great friendships until one suffers and laughs alongside kindred spirits.  One can't know the wisdom of age - the privilege of earning a louder voice in the crowd and a sturdier chair at the table - until one is first legitimized by the gray hair of struggle and years.

Truth be told, we often don't appreciate these things even now, unless we spend a little time thinking about where we once were.  If we look around us with eyes that glance occasionally at the past, we can much more easily be thankful for the great blessings with which we're so accustomed:  Shelter.  Income.  Family.  Safety.  Friends.  

If we were able to go back and ask our young selves what it was we really wanted, and if our young selves were capable of articulating the answer, we'd likely find that, at least in some aspects, we're now actually wildly ahead of what we could've possibly hoped.  We may not be race car drivers, singers or sports icons, but those things, to the unthinking mind of youth, were just the titles that would someday ascribe to us the qualities we hoped for:  People to take us seriously.  A life that contributed meaningfully.  To matter.  Now, years or even decades later, we may lack the titles, but we so easily forget how we've gained the qualities behind the titles, which were what we actually desired in the first place.

One of the reasons we don't often see things that way, is because the bar is always moving.  What we once thought would someday feel like great achievement, became something far less, as we gained knowledge and skill and experience.  We subconsciously learned the jaded truth of life:  The only thing separating a great accomplishment from drudgery is the number of times we've done it.  

But the other reason we don't recognize our blessings today - that we can't see our lives as the opportunities for growth they are - is because although looking back allows us to see how far we've come, it also requires us to see again all of the times we've failed.  To notice the pain and the regret and the heartache that went along with the growth.  The benevolent part of life, is that the severity of those feelings is lessened with the passage of time.  But the cheerless tradeoff, is that so too is the power of the feelings we had of those things that were good.  The misery of failure may have lost some sting, but not without first clouding the glass through which we see our gains.

So how then can we live hopefully?  How do we remain thankful for the good, while under the unyielding shackles of regret?   Common advice says, simply:  Move on.  

There's accuracy in this, of course.  For wrong turns, occasional short-tempered outbursts, and tests we should've studied for, we can move on.  Leave them behind, and do better next time.  But there are larger, uglier stories, for some of us.  Stories that, no matter how fast or how far we drive, still loom just as large in the rearview mirror.  Stories that, by any rationale, are a big deal.  They cannot be forgotten.  They don't merit forgiveness from anyone.  They were our doing, alone, yet they inflicted great anguish on others .  They left scars on many that - hideous and clear - will always remain.

My wife and I have one of those stories.  And though I have my wife's blessing to write of it, and though the events specifically involved her, I refuse to tell it without first asking the reader to see all of these things as having happened to us.  Caused by us.  As the failings of us.  She is my wife, and as such, we are one spirit.  A thing therefore cannot be effected by one of us.  It is effected by both.

To give a bit of background, my wife and I have known each other for 45 of my 48 years.  Our families met, in fact, because our mothers were roommates in the hospital when our sisters were born.  We grew up as close family friends:  We forged a bond playing in the woods and climbing the stacks of hay in the barn of her parent's farm, racing bicycles on the sidewalk and passing notes down the laundry chute of my family's house in the city.  It's safe to say there have been few surprises over the years:  We know each other.

What I knew then, as I know now, is that the girl who became my wife is quiet, kind and unassuming.  She possesses amazing creativity, and an expansive heart.  She loves to really know people, and to encourage the gifts she sees in them.

What I did not know, is that a number of years ago, she was slowly slipping into depression.  I had moved her to a new town, away from close friends and family.  I had absorbed myself in the worries of my job.  What I had not done was pay attention to her - to notice her - in the way a good man should notice his wife.

And I therefore didn't notice her silence.  Her hidden tears.  Her inattention to the things she once loved.

And I didn't notice the alcohol, that she began using late at night to dull the pain.  

And my unfeeling ignorance lasted until the accident.  

It was early evening.  She was leaving the house as I was coming home.  Headed on an errand, I assumed.   But then one hour led to two.  Calls unanswered.  Texts unanswered.  And then my phone rang.

A brief surge of relief in seeing her number blink across my screen dissolved into terror, as the voice of the Sheriff began to softly speak.  He told me that he was using her phone to reach me.  She was in a wreck.  It was pretty bad.   She was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital.  If you go now you can make it before the helicopter gets there.

The helicopter.

I don't remember gathering my two kids who were home, or calling the third who wasn't.  I vaguely remember the drive to the hospital with the accelerator on the floor.  I clearly remember the icy grip of panic and confusion and fear.

We made it in time for me to see her, barely-conscious, strapped to the gurney in the heli-pad area.  I remember my fear-slurred words:  "I love you".  It was all I could think of to say.  And then we were back in the truck, flat-out to the next hospital, racing the helicopter that carried my wife fastened aboard.

And I remember the State Police officer calling me,  90 minutes later, just as I was pulling into the parking garage of the medical center.

He wanted to know if she'd been to a party.  Wondered if I knew how much alcohol she'd had.  

Alcohol.  

Surely, I remember thinking, he had us mixed up with the family of the other driver - the one with whom my wife had collided.   

In the almost 40 years of knowing my wife at that time, I had never seen her with a glass of alcohol in her hand.  It's not that she was opposed to it.  It simply was something she never enjoyed.  So far off her radar, it seemed, that it was never even a consideration.

But the trooper, I slowly registered with a head-reeling nausea, wasn't talking to the wrong husband.  

I hadn't thought, until that moment, about the fact that experiencing an emotion at it's fullest extent, did not limit one from also experiencing a hundred others at their fullest extent.  Fear.  Anger.  Confusion.  Grief.  Rage.  Worry.  Sadness.  Disbelief.

The seat belt had cut her neck to within millimeters of her carotid artery.  The muscles and ligaments in her shoulder were damaged.  Her left index finger was severed.  But she would live, the surgeon said, after he emerged, hours later, from the cold room with the metal table and the stark bright lights.

The couple she hit that day were miraculously uninjured.  They later forgave us, in an act of selflessness for which we were completely undeserving, and which we will never forget.

But despite the blessings we had received there - the second chance at life we had both been given - I remember leaving the hospital with a cold, dark feeling in my bones.   

What does one do when the map is obscured?  When logic is no longer dependable and emotions are filled with lies and deception?  How do you process events you never imagined you'd experience?  Events you caused?  Is it possible to get past something that can't possibly be justified or written-off?  

The answers to the questions I asked myself did nothing to give me hope:  What if someone had collided with my family because they had been drinking?  Would I have been as compassionate as this family?  Would I have been so forgiving?  Or would I have, as was far more likely, been consumed with blind, righteous rage?  How do you explain something like this to your children?  How do you reassure them, calm their fears, about something you can't begin to even fully understand yourself?  About something that is most decidedly not O.K.?   

And how do my wife and I trust each other again?   The loss of faith she had developed over the years in me as a husband - the one that had brought her to this point - was an injury no more cured by surgery than were my newfound questions about what else I didn't know about her.  How do you face your family, your friends, your community, after such giant failings have been laid bare?  

What we discovered, was that the thing that made this so insurmountable - so impossible to solve - was the very thing that answered all questions.

The problem was so huge that it could not be hidden.  We were so guilty that we lacked any ability to justify ourselves.  We knew that gossip and harsh comments and awkward questions would come, and were absolutely deserved.  And there was a strange freedom born from these realizations.  We found that there is a bottom to even the deepest of holes - to even those we've dug for ourselves - that becomes a floor on which one can stand.

But not by forgetting about it.  We cannot simply forget the deep and overwhelming pain of having caused pain to others.  There are regrets.  There will always be regrets.  Time, as they say, marches on.  The hands on the clock only move one direction.   Despite feel-good admonitions to the contrary, regret is unavoidable, and that's as it should be:  It is precisely because we can't change a specific instance of inflicted damage that we feel sorrow for having caused it.   

It isn't by denying our failings - by forcibly "moving past" them - that things change.  There is no short way around regret, and it can bury us.  

Or it can serve as a reminder.  As motivation.  As a warning, to never travel that road again.  And it can serve, too, as a token of our blessings.

But neither should we simply and meekly sit by, while the world spins for others.  As long as there is breath in our lungs, as long as our hearts faintly beat;  if we have eyes to see and ears to hear and arms to hold those around us, we can do today what we wish we would've done yesterday.  

In my 48 years I have learned little else but this, and it is enough:  There is nothing that cannot be redeemed by God.  Nothing that he cannot turn for the good.  Nothing for which you have dug so deep, that you'll not reach to find the hand that will pull you to the surface again.

Regrets can never be forgotten, but they can be used for purposes far exceeding wistful sadness.  The regrets of old are a footing upon which to build the new.  And it is entirely possible to live out our years and never accrue one more.  Because regret is merely the physical sensation of realizing there was a time we loved ourselves more than we loved others.

But that was a life we used to live once, and never more.