Could Have, Should Have, Would Have
When there is no deal to be had with the past
I recently had a medical scan which involved in-depth preparation. I blocked out my morning for the procedure. I walked to the desk and announced my arrival. The young lady behind the desk politely informed me that she could not find my appointment. I informed her with complete certainty that I had checked the date with this very office, and it was today, the 22nd of November. With a bemused look, she told me that the date today was the 15th of November. I looked at her with a slight jaw droop, apologised, and left. On my way home from the hospital and began the inevitable enquiry in my mind.
This process involved me calculating the costs of the reorganisation of my day, and the inevitable explanation that would be required for my wife when she asked me how it went. The internal dialogue went something like this (without the expletives) … What had I done? How had I got the date out by a week? What an absolute idiot I was. I was telling myself I needed to buck my ideas up. On and on it went for the rest of the morning.
During this process, I created a narrative to satisfy myself. It had been a busy few weeks that had involved attending scans for injuries and routine check-ups. I would slow down and check my dates more carefully. The whole episode took me a day to reason through. I attended the appointment next week and did not think about the previous week’s mishap.
I must apologise to the reader for recounting this rather mundane tale of making a mistake, berating myself, moving on, and eventually getting the desired outcome. I had basically forgiven myself because I could ignore my mistake as I had been able to negotiate something that looked like a good outcome in my head. Most scenarios in our life will look like this. We can find ourselves in much less trivial situations than the one I described and somehow negotiate an outcome that we can live with.
I think about all the people who are on a long and successful second marriage or who have a good career after being made redundant or dismissed from previous employment. At the time of their divorce or sacking, it would have been awful, but they prevailed and often find themselves in a better position.
The ability to review unpleasant events in our lives, appropriately apportion blame to yourself and others, and move on to a more contented place does help us to gain wisdom. I think finding contentment requires an internal negotiation between our own desires and the reality of the world. Often, we realise that our desires may have been naïve or unobtainable. Someone who is 1.6 metres tall is not going to play professional basketball. However, they may be able to be a good amateur and potentially a great coach.
I think where we become unstuck is when our desires are reasonable and the reality we are presented with is the worst possible outcome.
Extreme life-changing events make it almost impossible to renegotiate in our heads the desire we have and the outcome that has been delivered. Most people want to have children, and it is a reasonable, decent desire that is the foundation of our society. The death of a child is the worst possible outcome for the parents. They cannot negotiate with themselves to find any contentment in the outcome.
I am aware of individuals who have had a child who has been very sick for a long time and then died. From the outside looking in, “we”—i.e., society—may be able to negotiate in our heads that, though this is a tragedy, the sick child will no longer be suffering, and the emotionally exhausted parents will finally be spared the agony of watching this. For the parents, they have lost everything, including the central purpose in their lives. What’s more, it is compounded by the potential future they have lost; this is addressed in the companion post How Important is Our Potential Future?
If they have other children or can have other children, this can often help (see the article - How a Landmark Study Sheds Light on Parental Grief ), but they will have to renegotiate so many other aspects of their lives. This includes who they are and how they associate with family, friends, and work colleagues. They will literally have to rip up most of their unconscious contracts with their social circle and start again.
As conscious beings, we have various states of mind, maybe too many to ever truly understand. One clear distinction when considering our cognition is which time frame we are in. Is it the present, the past, or the future? Losing a child will feel like it has destroyed your future, making the present unbearable, and perhaps the cruellest aspect is thinking about the past. This involves auditing the past through the paradigm of “Could Have, Should Have, Would Have” lenses. Everyone I have spoken to about this subject always tells me they do this. Unfortunately, you can think up the most ridiculous scenarios in which a decision of the parent, taken in the best of faith, will have directly contributed to the death of their child. In the initial phases of grief, your mind will take you everywhere. If, by chance, you latch onto one of these scenarios, it can cause a huge amount of distress. These can be some of the most intense periods of grieving in which you think you are going to become completely undone. It is not a feeling of guilt or unnecessary self-flagellation; but it can become that if left to grow. It is more a case of your mind’s need to see a pattern and to develop a suitable narrative for a tragic event with a horrific outcome. Nothing has prepared you for this cognative process.
The opposite end of this scenario is a complete denial and an inability to engage with the loss. This may involve individuals refusing to look at pictures, videos, keepsakes, rooms, or anything that could remind them of their loss. On rare occasions, people will not even talk about their loss. In one way, our subconscious is trying to protect us by not engaging in or reliving any aspect of a traumatic event. From personal experience and talking to others, people will experience aspects of both of these types of behaviour. The frequency and intensity usually diminish over time. That said, it is often the “Could Have, Should Have, Would Have” thoughts that can haunt the present and future. I am genuinely grateful that the scenarios that swirl around my head stretch incredulity so much that even on a bad day I cannot take them too seriously. What’s more, I do find I am far more careful in how I interact with people close to me. I would be terrified if I had serious regrets about how I treated someone I loved, and then something bad were to happen to them. This has probably made me a nicer person to know, but the price is certainly not worth it.