I am reading Stay True by Hua Hsu1, a memoir about the author’s university years and a friend who was killed.
In the section I am in now, he talks with a therapist. He feels guilty and partly responsible for his friend’s death. What if I had done something different that night? What if I had stayed at the party? What if I had dropped in on my way home?
It’s a normal response in our Western culture. Our minds like to beat itself up with what ifs and feeling responsible for things we are not responsible for.
If I was the therapist, there is one question I would have asked:
Why didn’t you save him?
The response, most likely, would have been:
I didn’t know what would happen. If I did, I would have done whatever I could to prevent it.
And that’s part of the answer. If he could have saved him, he would have done so. If he had known what was about to happen, he would have done things differently.
The reason we didn’t do it differently is that we didn’t know. We couldn’t have known. We were just living our lives as best we could.
NOTES
- I have read it since last summer! It’s a relatively short book, but because of my CFS and brain fog, I can only read a few paragraphs at a time, on a good day and at a good moment.