Life Regrets

I don’t have many regrets in life: some people at school I could have been kinder to; a relationship that should have been five months not five years; moving to Thailand and selling my flat. However, if I could go back again it would be to re-do the conversations I had with people who lost their loved ones to cancer.

I recognised their loss and expressed my sympathy of course...”sorry to hear about your Mum” etc. I only wish I’d understood what heart-breaking tragedy they had just lived through, what a huge range of emotions they had to face on their own as well as with their loved ones. If I had known what depth of anguish and fear they had witnessed, I would have done, said something, anything more than I did.

Now, I would stop, I would listen and take time to recognise the life-changing experience of watching someone they love die, because their body failed them, not their heart, not their mind and not through lack of sheer determination to live. The disease beat them and wore the body down. It beat the strongest drugs and the most earnest and desperate of prayers. It's a disease that is so vile and devastating, that the first feelings for the person who passes are of relief as they have finally been released from the suffering.  

I would also not forget that for a time their loss is something they live every moment of everyday with as normal life resumes. I know now that even with time, sadness is now a part of their life and it dwells just under the surface of everything, the pain ready to reappear at surprising moments and make the loss feel like yesterday again. I would realise that on special days, however happy they seem, some part of it is tarnished, knowing their loved one didn't get to see it.

I wish I'd known then what strong and courageous people they had lost and what strong and courageous people they had to become themselves because of losing somoene they loved to cancer.


Oh, what I’d give for a hundred years
But the physical interferes
Every day more – oh my creator
What is good with the strongest heart?
In a body that’s falling apart?
A serious flaw
I hope you know that...


Waltz for Eva and Che

From Evita