The Endgame
Newsletter #91 - Regret
Toronto, December 22, 2024
Regret
Do you think the end is near? Are you facing the final curtain? Do you have regrets? No big deal. Frank Sinatra—Ol’ Blue Eyes, the Sultan of Swoon—sang: “Regrets, I've had a few/ But then again, too few to mention...” Readers will know that the song is My Way, a narcissistic ditty (lyrics by Paul Anka) beloved by billionaires and sung at their bibulous birthday parties by grotesquely-paid singing celebrities.
Much better to have a new love than face the final curtain. Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien sung by Édith Piaf—the Little Sparrow, La Môme Piaf—looks determinedly to a sunny future. The New York Times described the tune as “the soaring song about sweeping away the past to find love anew that... Édith Piaf turned into an anthem of French culture.” There may be a lot to regret in life, but the singer of this song regrets nothing: “It’s paid, swept away, forgotten/I don’t care about the past!” She has found new love: “No, I regret nothing/Because my life, because my joy/Today... it begins with you!” Édith Piaf, who was married twice and had many lovers, died in 1963 aged 47. Her last words were, "Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.”
Regrets pile up as you live your life. If you’re old, the pile will be high. There are many different kinds of regrets. There are the opportunities not spotted. Why didn’t I buy shares of Apple in 1995? Perplexity, my favourite chatbot, tells me: “[A]n investment of $1,000 in Apple stock in 1995 would be worth approximately $1,043,875 as of December 19, 2024. This remarkable growth represents a return of over 104,000% over the 29-year period.” Damn! Then there are dreams that have been dashed: for example, I’ve never met Charlotte Rampling (see Endgame #23). And always there are disappointments endured. Why were none of my books on best-seller lists? (What’s the opposite of hot cakes? Perplexity says the opposite includes “cold cakes, flops, duds, and unpopular items.”)
These kinds of disappointments don’t matter. They’re not worth regretting. They don’t keep you up at night. What interferes with sleep is the keen recollection of bad moral and ethical decisions and lapses. They haunt your conscience. Almost always these bad decisions and lapses involved the treatment of other people. The time in a shopping mall when you lost your temper and slapped a five-year-old child who was screaming: that happened more than forty-five years ago, but at three o-clock in the morning it’s as if it happened yesterday. A failure of friendship on an important occasion: the failure was unforgiveable but the friend forgave you: the friend is now dead but in your mind, at night, your failure lives on. The nagging thought that, as a much-loved parent aged, you were not sufficiently kind or empathetic or patient and were driven as much by duty as by love. “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...”
What to do with real regret, the kind that matters and cannot be erased? There is nothing you can do, except accept it. Once again, as always, we turn to the poet: “Regret/ a heavy word. So unlike egret,/ the white bird who lifts gently/ out of the marsh... (Regret, by Melanie Tafejian)
Some reader comments on Newsletter #90 (“The person you might have been”)
A reader writes: “I often contemplate the roads not travelled. It’s usually accompanied by yet another re-examination of the ‘how the hell did I get here’ question. I’m not where I planned to be at 68, nowhere near it, but most of what has derailed me were bombs dropped by that thing we call bad luck. And no matter what road I travelled, those bombs may still have dropped.”
A sad story: “In 1966 my mother, 11 year-old brother, and I travelled by ship (The Empress of Canada) from Northern Ireland via Liverpool to Montreal, then boarded an overnight train to Toronto. I was age 7. I was glad to see land after a week at sea. My father and 12 year-old sister flew ahead to Canada the year before to settle my sister in school. I didn't see them during that year. I feel the loneliness as I write this. That long-distance move fragmented our family, displaced us from our own lovely home, neighbours, and the close women friends of my mother's—women I called Auntie Margaret, Auntie Mary, Auntie Greta, etc. My mother… returned to Ireland to be with her parents... I don't remember her leaving or returning; although she did return, reluctantly, because she didn't want to leave me—her youngest child—in the care of my father and his new woman-friend. My parents divorced two years later. I needed those women friends of my mother's, as I had no one to turn to throughout the years that my mother suffered from depression, isolation, and loneliness, her life having been uprooted. My sister returned to Ireland at the age of 21 and has lived there ever since. Canada has never felt like home to me. I miss the sea and the smell of the moist air.”
A sunnier point of view: “Very nice piece and one that resonates powerfully with me due to my reluctant return to Canada from graduate school in London so many decades ago. But guess I put the lie to Thomas Wolfe's famous line, ‘You can never go home again.’ I am very, very happy I returned.”
A new reader sent this charming and unlikely commercial for a Taiwanese bank:
And a generous comment from a former student: “I think you gave yourself short shrift on the choices you made. While I envy how easy it was for you to switch to law… you neglected to mention your years as a law professor at McGill and Western. You may have ‘ended up as a corporate lawyer on Bay Street, helping the rich get richer,’ but you also helped many students enrich their understanding of the law. And then you later developed a career as a writer. We can all second-guess our choices, but at least you explored more of them than most corporate lawyers.”
You're so right, that it's the moral and ethical fails that return with sharp edges to reproach us. Reading your sentences about that have given me a little moment of reassurance: that others, too, have moral/ethical failings that haunt them. There's a balm in knowing I have companions in that place of self-reproach.
The Taiwanese bank commercial is a real inspiration, as is the comment from one of your former students. Comments like this can take the sting out of possible regrets, just knowing that someone was touched positively by a choice that we now question in retrospect. It was very kind of this student to let you know.