If I’m forgotten did I never exist?

by Roberta Ness

Love, regret, and the small brave acts that make us last

Welcome back to our corner booth. Hope you’re getting the chill out of your bones with that beautiful afternoon sun streaming onto your shoulders. I’ve got a fresh pot of Earl Grey today to warm up a topic that has frozen me with a sense of impossibility – how to deal with relationships we leave unresolved and how to feel we’ll be fondly remembered.

I’ve asked dozens of people why they find death so frightening. “I’m leaving too many broken relationships, too much undone business,” an 80-year-old friend told me. Yet, when I asked my mother in her final weeks, joyful tears filled her eyes as she reflected on a life that felt to her full and complete. Among her last words, she said, “I’ve had the best possible life.” I knew this to be true of a woman who had developed deep and meaningful relationships and cleared up past grievances.

The Weight of Words Unsaid

How many times have you thought, “I wish I had a better relationship with my brother, my ex-wife, my son/daughter, my friend from high school, my ___(fill in the blank).” What sparked the rift? For my friend Josh it was, “We let a silly inheritance dispute tear us apart.”

A groundbreaking 2022 study in the Journal of Palliative Medicine surveyed 2,000 hospice patients and found that relationship regrets dominated their end-of-life concerns…