Tag: Paul Fenton

Three Stories About Old People with Regrets

I read a couple of books and watched a movie lately about old people at the end of their lives who are trying to deal with a major regret.  I would recommend these stories highly – any of them are perfect for a cold winter’s evening.  The books are The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, and the movie is The Great Escaper (on Amazon). I’ll try to talk about these stories without spoiling the endings – and, in these cases, the endings are true endings.  They are all about elders trying to deal with regrets, mistakes, and profound guilt.  It seems to me that this is a prevalent and profound problem of old age; in old age we have a lot of time to think and a tendency to look back.  If you are exempt from major regrets, you are privileged indeed.  I surely have moments in my past that I regret, that I am still trying to deal with, and which flare up from the embers of my memories.  What to do with them?

Religion or AA might tell us that we need to atone, or, at least, apologize.  But the older we are the more likely it is that the actions are long buried along with many of the participants.  How do we deal with those regrets, guilts?  Make a deathbed confession?  Ask a priest or someone else we trust to absolve us?  Must we realize, finally, that they were the product of where we were at the time and chalk it up to karma – and assume we will pay or have paid for our transgressions one way or another?  I was recently thinking of Dryden’s riff on Horace – “Happy the Man” – but that speaker is “secure within” and satisfied that he has “had his hour.”  What if we regret the hour?  And how do we adjust the scales so everything comes out alright?  As the clerk at the Marigold Hotel reiterates, “Everything will be alright in the end, so if it is not alright, it is not the end.”

Each of these three stories concern an older person who sincerely regrets something in their past.  And, in at least two of the cases, they surely have committed (or given tacit approval to) a grievous act.  The third case is situational, where a soldier does what he has to do, but there are dire consequences.  All of these incidents happened many years ago, but shadow the rest of the lives of these characters. What to do?  What can be done?

Let me tell you how the characters in these stories deal with it.  The protagonist in The Correspondent, Sybil, (unsurprisingly) writes letters, letters she sends and letters she does not send.  Besides having mortality breathing down her back, she is dealing with the imminent loss of her sight.  This is a woman who is deeply attached to the written word in all its forms, and it is the word that keeps her going.  Sybil writes to famous people (like Joan Didion), some of whom even write back.  She writes to her children, old friends, and herself.  She writes to living people and dead people and, in the process, she slowly seems to sort things out.  It will make you mourn the lost art of letter writing; it will make you want to write letters.  Or a journal.  Do it.

Ian McEwan waited until he was in his mid-seventies to write one of his finest books.  Earlier in his life, of course, he wrote the classic Atonement, about guilt and absolution.  In Atonement, a woman spends a lifetime trying, at least partially by writing, to make sense of a youthful mistake.  In What We Can Know, there is an academic mystery being researched in the far future.  Where is the lost poem, the renowned corona of which there was only one copy?  The book sets itself up as a literary mystery, which is resolved by the “last testament” of the poet’s elderly wife – she has produced one piece of writing and destroyed another, in revenge and atonement.  The novel asks questions about the words and deeds we leave behind; the title morphs from What We Can Know to “what can we know?” This story got me thinking (again) about what to do with all my old journals.

(Incidentally, the novel looks backward, but it is framed in a time period a hundred years hence, and we get this caution from our narrator:  “I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them in the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.  Do not trust the keyboard and screen.  If you do, we’ll know everything.” Fair warning.)

The Great Escaper stars the very old Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson.  Jackson died shortly after the film was made.  Both stars were closing in on ninety when the filming was done, which was only appropriate as the story is about a 90-year-old man.  I have to admit that at first it is very hard to watch those very old bodies – much older than we usually see on the screen – but the film soon sweeps you away with both the love between the two oldsters and the heroic effort that Bernie makes to understand and atone for his actions at the beach at Normandy seventy years before. When I was young, I would not have believed someone could be so tormented by things that they did seven decades ago; now I know better.   And when Bernie gets to the 70th commemoration of the Normandy invasion, he finds that he is not the only one who is abashed to be treated as a hero when he feels like a traitor.  But, back on the beach and at the military cemetery, he faces his demons.  Those demons might not be completely vanquished, but they are at least acknowledged and shared.

These stories do not display miraculous cures for our trespasses; even if our sins are forgiven, we still cannot ever forget them.  Sybil, the letter-writer in The Correspondent, has made a pen pal of Joan Didion, and she quotes her: “What I have made for myself is personal, but it is not exactly peace.”  Stephen Crane put it more crudely: “But I like it/Because it is bitter, /And because it is my heart.”  Our regrets are personal, they are bitter, but when we at least acknowledge them, we might be able to accept them as part of who we are.

I’ll end with one of my favorite poems, “The Ideal,” by Paul Fenton.

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

For one of my stories about regret, you might try “Shrove Tuesday.“

Reunions – Looking Back with Affection and Embarrassment

I was recently tracked down by a very nice woman who was a classmate of mine during my first two years of college – 50 years ago.  After my sophomore year, I married and could not afford to return to school right away, so I quickly lost track of the good friends I made during those two years  – perhaps the kind of friends you never make again.  We were young, female, and completely out from under our parents’ thumbs for the first time in our lives.  In addition, this was the sixties.  When I arrived, there were strict curfews and prohibitions about spending nights off campus without parental permission (this was a women’s college); within a few months all restrictions were lifted.  Fun, but dangerous to a seventeen-year-old like myself who had no idea what to do with such freedom.  I often think that I burned myself out quickly and retreated to a disastrous early marriage.  In any case, that was the situation, and – while I could recall those days and people vividly when I tried – I mostly struggled not to remember.

So out of the blue comes one of the nicest of those remembered classmates, who has volunteered to be in charge of rounding up all the women who lived in our campus residence house for the 50th reunion.  I have no intention of attending the reunion (I ended up graduating from a different college), but I found myself interested in catching up with her and ultimately agreed to submit some basic information for the reunion book – including a 500-word essay on what I had been doing for the last 50 years.   That would be 10 words per year, but – then again – some of those years I barely remember.

Nevertheless, I gave it a go and recommend it as an exercise.  In fact, we all do it verbally pretty consistently when we meet new people, and they want to know something about us.  But this felt different.  These people knew what a mess I was a half-century ago.  I wanted to show the trajectory of where I had been, how I had recovered, what was still left to do.  Here is a brief excerpt, leaving out those parts about my children, husbands, degrees and locations:

I think we went to college in strange times – when I arrived at _____ as an innocent young woman (girl) of barely 17, I had just managed to learn what parietals were when they were abolished.  It was a wild time that I remember well and yet often find painful to recall.  I met warm friends, and tested myself, my friends, my teachers, and my parents in a multitude of ways – but apparently got the wild oats out of my system.  I have been determined that my old age would be more thoughtful and deliberate than my youth (wouldn’t take much) and have been much taken with the study of old age and literature – the topic on which I wrote my dissertation and on which I maintain a blog…. Through all these years I have read voraciously, taken piano lessons most of the time (with little effect), belonged to writing groups (same result), hiked, and knit….

Before she died, my mother gave me a pile of letters I wrote home while at ____.  I haven’t read them (sense of embarrassment surely); they reside in the back of the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk.  It is telling that I haven’t discarded them. But hearing from some of my classmates has perhaps given me the strength to revisit those years.

If fact, those letters in the drawer – envelopes covered with little pictures and slogans (“Wear Your Love Like Heaven”) have silently mocked me for years.

But I am reminded of a poem by Paul Fenton (“The Ideal”):

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

It is hard to deal with those portions of our life of which we are not proud, but I am glad to have had my old classmate give me a shove.  I wrote those letters; I was exuberant if misguided.  And I was lucky to be surrounded by kind people.  As I age, as we all age, a common phenomenon is to have a better memory of the far past than we have of the recent past.  But those memories shouldn’t hurt.  They made us who we are.

It has always been so.  One might incant a line from Psalm 25: “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, O Lord.”  Amen to that.

I have never written about my early college life – even in fiction.  But “The Iscariot” or “Shrove Tuesday” contain characters who try to deal with the irreversibility of the past.