Unlived Lives
By: David Kernohan
Tags: Grief, Contentment, Choices, Acceptance, Life

This past week was my son’s 37th birthday. At least it would have been if he lived. He died 13 years ago. Over the years, I have learnt to live with grief. You never really “get over it”; you learn to accommodate grief. As the years have passed, the throbbing intensity of grief has reduced to pools of pain and sometimes, like this year, the pool overflows, and grief seeps through daily life.

As I reflected on my son’s 37th birthday, I wondered what his life would have been like, what he would have chosen to do, who, if anyone, he would have chosen as a partner. It is easy to allow oneself to grow sad over the life he did not live, and yet, such sadness would be misplaced. While he lived, he lived a full life. A life not without its challenges but a full life still the same.

We all, like my son, have unlived lives. Lives we could have chosen, yet we chose other paths for one reason or another and lived different lives. The poem by Robert Frost, “The road not taken” that I studied in high school, has remained with me.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Choices we have made, decisions we have taken that have made the difference in our lives.

When our current lives are not going well, when we are experiencing difficulty and hardship, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “I should have done things differently”. I should have taken the other path. I should have done another profession or partnered with the other person rather than my current partner.

There is an inherent fault with such thinking. The fault is this; it makes our other life the perfect life in our imagination. If I had been with the other person, I would have the ideal relationship, and if I had taken the other profession, I would be more successful. This is illusory thinking.

The stanza above states, “long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth”. We could not and cannot see beyond the bend in the undergrowth. We do not know if the other life we imagine for ourselves would have been better; it could be worse.

When we engage in imaginary thinking about what could have been, we are not present in our current life. We do not live this life fully because we are busy imagining another life for ourselves.

We avoid the pain that could bring us healing and prefer a fantasy where we are a Marvel hero in the script of our lives.

If our current life is difficult, being absent from this life only creates more difficulties. As men, we can be skilled at being absent.

For example, we can be absent in our relationships by blaming. Rather than taking responsibility for our part in relationship difficulties, we blame our partner or our children. We can be absent by shutting down emotionally and remaining closed and cut off, unwilling to open to another.

Addictions remove us from our current situation, promising present release and freedom, addictions store up pain and trauma with compound interest for a future date.

What is it, to be present to the life we have, rather than imaging a different life?

To be present in our current life is to learn contentment. For me, contentment is an umbrella description of three different emotions; peace, acceptance and confidence.

Acceptance is accepting; I made the best decisions I could have made when I made them with the information I had available. Would I make a different decision now? Possibly, but now I have other information available to me, so I am not in the same situation as when I made the first decision. Acceptance also helps me accept I have not missed out. Part of the fantasy of the other life is that I have missed out in my current life. When I accept my present life, I can rest without the fear of missing out gnawing at me.

Peace comes from acceptance. Peace also comes from knowing that all lives are a mix of positive and negatives, good times and not so good. Our fantasy life would not be more blissful, more positive or necessarily better than our current life. If our fantasy life became a reality, then we would possibly fantasize about our present life. When we are at peace in our current life, we can engage because we are not distracting ourselves with our illusions or desires for something different.

Finally, confidence comes because we have leaned into our current life’s pain, challenges, and disappointments. We have learnt from leaning in we can manage the discomfort and the pain. We have learnt the easiest way to heal is to lean into the wound. Our experience of leaning in gives us the confidence to know we can continue to lean in, heal, and grow in accepting our present lives and grow, not only in acceptance but also in peace.