“The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me, but I can’t take back the things I never did.”
—
- Johnathan Safran Foer
I’m going to dedicate my first real blog post to this. I hate that I love this quote. Simple, but heartbreakingly true. It seems most people are too caught up in every mistake they’ve made and focus both their time and energy into dealing with “what they’ve done.” How often, though, do you hear someone talking about things they never did? It’s because it’s scary. It’s scary knowing we can and will fail to do things. It’s scary knowing that sometimes we will sit back and watch ourselves fail, and not realize what we've not done until it’s too late. We will fail in school. We will fail in work. We will fail in relationships. We will fail people. I think this thought process occurs most often after someone dies, which makes sense. “I should have done this,” or “I should have done that.” I never thanked my grandmother for my birthday card. I never told her how much it meant that I was on her mind. I never told my dad things I should have told him, like how I appreciated what he did for me. Our family was his world. I always told him I loved him, but never how much. In a way, they were empty words. Not that they weren’t true, but how true? He raised me to appreciate what I was given, and to put others before myself. But I ended up putting the one who taught me those principles after everything else in my life. As soon as my sister told me our father had only three months to live, I tried my absolute hardest to act as if it weren’t true. It’s something none of us wanted to talk about more than necessary. We all spent more time with him during those months, but if we all had broken down, I think we would have all gone insane. And even though he told me everything would be okay, I never spent as much time with him as I should have. I never asked him how he felt about what was happening. I never asked him to finish the letters he wrote to all four of us before it was too late when he became too sick to write. I never expressed to him the deep feelings I always hold inside of me.
I never told him he was the best dad in the world, until he collapsed and died in mine and my sister’s arms.
I never.
I never.
I never.
