The Choice

different word. Or nothing at all. I could have followed her to the
showers and died with her. I could have done something different. I
could have done more. I believe this.
And yet. (is “and yet” opening like a door.) How easily a life can
become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the
same chorus, with the inability to forgive ourselves. How easily the life
we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are
seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in
control, that the things we could or should have done or said have the
power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase
suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to—worship—the
choices we think we could or should have made.
Could I have saved my mother? Maybe. And I will live for all of the
rest of my life with that possibility. And I can castigate myself for
having made the wrong choice. at is my prerogative. Or I can accept
that the more important choice is not the one I made when I was
hungry and terrified, when we were surrounded by dogs and guns and
uncertainty, when I was sixteen; it’s the one I make now. e choice
to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect. And the choice to be
responsible for my own happiness. To forgive my Ęaws and reclaim my
innocence. To stop asking why I deserved to survive. To function as
well as I can, to commit myself to serve others, to do everything in my
power to honor my parents, to see to it that they did not die in vain.
To do my best, in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t
experience what I did. To be useful, to be used up, to survive and to
thrive so I can use every moment to make the world a better place.
And to ĕnally, ĕnally stop running from the past. To do everything
possible to redeem it, and then let it go. I can make the choice that all
of us can make. I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can
save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment.
I am ready to go. I take a stone from the ground, a little one, rough,