The ones you can't

I've been using a small example on purpose, and it would be dishonest to leave it there. Some of what people replay isn't a clumsy sentence. It's a real loss that they had a hand in.

You let a good relationship go out of fear or pride, and they married someone else. You put your savings into something that failed. You spent your thirties in the wrong career and can't have them back. You were short-tempered with your mother in her last year because you were exhausted, and then she died. You weren't watching for one minute, and someone was hurt.

I won't tell you these don't matter or that you shouldn't regret them. Regret is the proper response to a real loss that you contributed to. A person who felt none would be strange. The aim of this chapter isn't to get you to feel fine about it.

What I'd like to do is separate two things that have got wound together, the regret and the replay.

Regret is a feeling about a fact. "I wish I'd been kinder to her that year." It's sad and true, and it may be with you for life. It tends to be quiet. It visits on anniversaries, when you hear a certain song or when you see a mother and daughter in a café. It doesn't demand anything. You feel it, and it passes, and it leaves you a bit more tender towards the people you still have.

The replay is an activity. It's the going back in, the re-arguing, the "if only I'd" repeated on a loop, the search for the version where it comes out differently. It isn't quiet. It has the flinch and the groan, and it demands something impossible, which is a different ending.

As far as I can tell from how people describe it, the replay can get in the way of the regret. While you're busy re-running that last year and trying to edit it, you're not grieving your mother. You're arguing with the past, which is a way of not yet accepting that it happened. People sometimes find that when the replays ease off, what comes in their place is plain sadness. It can be strong at first. But sadness moves and changes over time, and replays don't.

Several of the earlier chapters apply with extra force to the large events.

Hindsight, from chapter 4, is at its most severe here. You now know she had a year left. You didn't then. You were tired, and you thought there was time, because there nearly always is. Ask what you knew then, and answer fairly.

The sample, from chapter 8, is at its most distorted. You remember the three times you snapped at her. You've lost the two hundred ordinary visits, the lifts to the hospital, and the evening you sat with her till she slept. She had all of it, the whole year, and I'd be surprised if the snapping was what she thought of when she thought of you.

And the question from chapter 9, about what can still be done, has answers even here. They're just not answers that change the past. You can't have your thirties again, but you can decide what the next ten years are for, using what the wrong career taught you about what you want. You can't be kinder to your mother, but there are people alive now who'd benefit from the patience you wish you'd had. A loss that changes how you live has been put to some use. One that you only replay has been put to none.

One caution. If the event was violent, sudden or frightening, and it returns as vivid images, nightmares or a feeling of being back there, please reread the second caution in the preface. That's not a habit of thought to be reasoned with. It's a recognised condition that responds to proper treatment, and a GP is the place to start.

For the rest, the method in chapter 12 works on large events as well as small ones. It won't remove the regret, and I wouldn't want it to. It can give the event what the replays never have, a complete and fair account that you've written once and that has an end.