Preface To Regret: German Regret

(I found this here.)

The other day, last November, I found myself around a small kitchen table with three old German people.  I was related to one of them.  Two were in their mid-eighties, the other in her late seventies.  Even though it was the middle of the day, the oldest one, a male, not related to me, put a beer in front of me.  I thought that was weird, since they weren't drinking.

One of the German people was my mother.  Didn't they know I was driving her home later?

The oldest German person was asking me lots of questions about my life.  Like most people, he was really only asking because he wanted to talk to me about his life.  I guess he doesn't know me well, although he's technically known me my entire life.  Because I am a talker.

But I understood what he was doing, so I let him talk.  He wanted to let me know that he knew his life was soon to be over, & that he regretted not doing so many things.  He wasn't too forthcoming about what exactly he had wanted to do that he didn't do, but he did constantly tell me not to do what he did, & enjoy my life.  Something uncomfortable was the fact that his wife - the woman to whom he's been married for over half a century - sat across that small table & heard everything he said.  But I suppose fifty years is a long time, & she had probably heard this spiel many times before.  There's a kind of acceptance past "sick of your shit."

My mother didn't hear anything, because she's deaf as a post, but too vain to get a hearing aid.  They're for old people, she says.  Not eighty-six-year-young women like herself.  If someone had to ask me what the most common reply to anything I say to her was, I would say it's "What?"  After which, she pretends she hears me, & then says whatever she was planning to say.

Honestly I don't know what immediate reaction I had to the old German man dumping his regret on me, even though it happened just the other day, last November.  Later on, I was a bit amused, because I remembered some of the stories my mother had told me about him.  It seems that he's done pretty much what he's wanted to do his entire life, including cheating on his sweet, long-suffering wife.  If the stories are true (& I have no idea if they are), he's been involved in some shady dealings, some of which involved family & friends.

Does he regret that, & wish he had lived a better life?  Or is he just at the end of his life & wishes he'd been more daring?  We didn't choose this, you know, but perhaps there's a sense of buyer's remorse for some of us.

I'll call this "German Regret" from now on.  Getting away with most things during you life, but regretting it at the end anyway.

Because there are people who don't regret anything.  I know them.  They terrify me.