On Handling Regret After a Beloved Dies

(another essay on grief)

The other night I had the first of what likely will be many of those “my-father-is-alive” dreams...one of those dreams that seems to be so common after the death of a parent, in which suddenly they are there in your consciousness--well and alive and whole--and your dream-self rejoices, because your dream-self “forgot” they were alive, and your dream-self vows to spend every precious second of living life serving this beloved father, making sure he is comfortable, happy, entertained, not alone, feeling cherished and loved. And it’s a joyous feeling, and a sacred vow, and you feel so aligned with your true purpose--to honor thy father and mother--and then you wake up and remember he actually died a few weeks ago, and you were sometimes (or was it very often?) kind of a shit daughter, and there are so many things you wish you did differently, and then you question that dream-joy--was it even real?--and then you torture yourself for a while with all the things you did not do--especially toward the end. Why did I not spend more time with him just listening to music? In a world that has no shortage of beautiful transcendent music? We could have shared more of that together. And why did I not give him more footrubs as he was lying there for months in that hospital bed? And why did I not insist, in his final hours of life, that the nurses replace that offensively loud oxygen concentrator--a nervous-system shattering device that removed any potential for contemplative concentration--with a simple oxygen tank? And how could I have forgotten--in his final moments--to position his body in the Lion posture and press the proper pulses, as is taught in the Bardo Thodol? And why did I not think to take an ink-impression of his fingerprint in his final week, so that I could create a work of art in his honor? (This has been my latest obsession--to create a piece of painting with owls and dragonflies and his fingerprint and the White Mountains). And why did I not remember to clip a lock of his hair?

Oh, regret, regret.