Reading Time: 4 min
She sat down, disheveled and exhausted. She was just an old lady on the street, no one paid any attention to her tears.
They say there is no burden as heavy as guilt but compound it with grief, and nothing weighs you down as much as this does. It was a warm sunny November morning but all she felt was a cold in her bones. That lingering feeling of old loss, gnawing at her soul screaming that no matter what she did, nothing would make her feel better.
She still smiled, she still laughed, but every year this day there was a resignation in her heart, an unyielding voice reminding her that she would always be that naïve imprudent girl that she was thirty years ago.
This was her penance, to re-live that day, to face her sins of the past, away from everyone who loved her, so she could hate herself. There was a single drop of tear that rolled down her cheek. She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer; all she could pray for the day to get over quickly.
Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind, But it is very difficult to treat because it cannot even be defined, Because everything is not gold that glisters and everything is not a tear that glistens, And one man’s remorse is another man’s reminiscence
Ogden Nash, I’m a Stranger Here Myself
Lifelong guilt
One can never really predict how they would feel after the death of a loved one. Some question their inability to do enough. Some blame themselves for doing something that should not be done. Then, there is residual guilt, a constant sorrow that bereaving individuals experience which when left untouched festers into self-loathing, an emotion which leads them to believe that they are responsible for the deaths and thus live with a debilitating remorse that leaves them a shell of a human being. Grief becomes the sole motivation of their existence and self hatred becomes their life’s ambition. There is an old lady on the street in all of us.
That is why it becomes important to share grief. Being gentle, being compassionate to themselves, letting the regret leave, and congratulating themselves for every day lived. The only answer to guilt is forgiveness, to remember that we did the best that we could and whatever happened was just never under our control.
PS: The story is a figment of my imagination, the themes derived from my own life. It has no relation with the person in the image.
