With Age Comes Regret, But Pebbles Still Create Amazing Ripples
John Clark musing about this month’s dual topic options, Heartbreak or world events. Like Mary Strand so eloquently pointed out, they’re like Siamese twins these days, inextricably entwined. In quiet moments, I tend to look back on my passage through life with ever more insight and clarity. Buried in my mental file of ‘stories I better write soon’, is one about a man dying of cancer who’s under hospice care. His illness ravages him a bit more each day, but refuses to let him go.
His hospice person, a wise non-Caucasian, tells him he has too many unresolved regrets to be set free. When the ailing man asks how he can deal with them, his caretaker offers him an organic psychedelic that allows him to go as far back in the past as he can and rectify as many slights, hurts, and instances of meanness as possible. The man, initially reluctant, agrees, only to find so much in his past that needs fixing, that he must make the journey several times. On one trip, he finds himself in early grammar school where he realizes how many kids he judged because of their looks or family living conditions. As he gradually changes his relationships with them, he feels a tiny lessening in his misery. Another trip forces him to make amends to old girlfriends he treated shabbily, or exploited. Still another has him undo acts of greed, meanness, and dishonesty in his work life.
Each time he returns to his present situation, his agony lessens a bit more until he is told by his caregiver that one last trip, the most challenging and arduous, remains. He must go back as far as possible and eat every mean word he ever uttered. Doing so is scary, but not nearly as much as continuing living in agony with no relief in sight. The sheer quantity of mean, sarcastic, racist, and belittling things he uttered over the years, makes him so nauseous that he has to make a stop at a metaphysical rest area on the way home so he can vomit all of them up. This final act allows him to die in peace.
I expand the number of like events I’d undo or fix every time I contemplate my past. Since I have no magic guide, I make do by proxy, working extra hard to do kindnesses to people I see every day, opening doors, helping a less agile and older fellow swimmer by making certain he gets his socks on after swimming, telling uplifting jokes, demonstrating attentive listening and respect as often as I can.
All of these make life a lot more pleasant than it could be given the current world situation. Major world events have stopped my writing in its tracks twice. The first was 9/11, the second last November’s election.
Having been active last fall in campaigning for local candidates, spending considerable money supporting candidates endorsed by Emily’s List, not to mention making out and mailing 200 postcards to undecided voters in Nevada, I was foolishly optimistic about the presidential election. The result stole not only my creativity, it ate up almost all my mental and emotional energy.
I came out of it sufficiently in February to start a dark dystopian YA novel I’m calling “Sailing Past The Apocalypse. I could have finished it in April, but hated to write the end, so it sits patiently, awaiting my writing the final chapter.
My outrage at the fascist sham in Washington, finally got me back into action, making phone calls, writing legislators, marching (I’m writing this ahead of the big Not My King march here in Waterville, as well as signing up to write 400 more postcards in hopes they will have a positive impact on the election in Virginia this fall.
I’m also wearing buttons to support the LGBTQIA community, attending Pride events, and restraining myself from running cars with tRump stickers off the road. Still, I persist and hope you do as well.
Collected or purchased at the Waterville PRIDE Festival. Some will go to my granddaughters.
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