Showing posts with label regrets. Show all posts

The word itself is ugly. Nobody likes to have regrets. It's not exactly a goal in anybodies life. My grandfather used to tell me that when I got old I would look back and the fewer regrets I had, the happier I would be. That sounds like pretty sound advice looking back.

Just because it's good advice doesn't mean it gets followed though does it? We all have those moments in our lives that we wish we could revisit and maybe change the outcome of. I arrived at that moment recently while rereading a post from Hunter at The Time Crook. He made this post and it really got me to thinking.

I'm full of silly childhood regrets, but there are a few that are a bit more on my mind as I get a little older. I'm gonna share one of those with you, but first I have to preface this a little bit. I'm a believer in the Death Penalty...Wow where did that come from right? If you kill somebody intentionally, then you deserve to die for it in my opinion. If we are going to keep people alive for 15 years after the crime then giving them the death penalty is pointless...

That said, here's my regret...

As a teenager I had a friend named Richie. We played sports together, we hung out together and we were pretty good friends through junior high school and all the way through high school as well. Now Richie was a nice kid. He was as pleasant as they come, and he was well mannered. In fact to the point that my parents were always telling me that I better be every bit as well behaved as Richie when I was out and about.

Richie came from a dysfunctional home. In the sense that his parents didn't or wouldn't show him any affection. He was the oldest of three brothers, and he was constantly expected to be responsible for anything and everything they did. They doted on both of the other boys, but Richie was never given that love and affection that he craved. He spent more and more of his time at my house. My parents accepted him in as one of our own, and even offered to let him come live with us to finish high school when it became so bad at his house. He was 18 before he graduated and his parents were going to make him move out and support himself to finish high school. Fortunately that didn't happen. I will never forget some of the times we dropped him off after a high school football game at some random hotel that his parents were at for one of their workshops. They never had time to watch him play sports, but they managed to watch the other two.

After High School we went our separate ways sort of. I joined the military and he went to a junior college down south. He was going to be a broadcast journalist. I'm quite sure that he would have made a hell of a good one too. Things don't always work out the way we plan though do they? He met a girl and all of a sudden he was in a relationship for really the first time in his life. I never met this girl, but he was happy and so I was happy for him.

Life kept moving on though and I was soon caught up in my own little slice of life. I was married and working, and on top of that I was going to be a dad. I heard that Richie had some trouble down south, but nobody really knew much about it. I was too caught up with my own little world to worry all that much about it. I figured if he needed me, he would call or write (pre-internet). Sure enough I got a letter from Richie, but by this time, I was going through some other stuff in my life. I was getting ready to get divorced, and I was wondering how I would be able to raise my child as a single parent. I didn't have time to talk to Richie, and I didn't really want to know what was going on in his life to be honest. I didn't bother to respond to his letter, and I didn't bother to notice that it was postmarked from a correctional facility.

A year went by before I found out the details of my friend. He was on death row. He was found guilty of murder. He had killed his girlfriend and her mother. I won't offer up the specifics of this horrific crime, because it haunts me still. Let's just say that it was gruesome, and he admitted to it, and was more than willing to pay for his crime.

I wasn't there for my friend when he needed me though. I wasn't there when he went through his break up, and I wasn't there to help talk him down, from whatever crazy place his mind brought him too. I was forced to accept that I had failed him as a friend. That of course doesn't mean that I had anything to do with all the madness that followed, but it's a what if moment for me.

Fast forward to now. He is still on death row. He is a mentor in the prison system, and has helped many fellow inmates achieve their GED and even some advanced learning. They have tried to appeal for all these years to get him off death row. I even offered up a deposition, explaining his childhood, and the person I knew compared to the madman that committed that crime.

Should he die? Yeah, he deserves to pay for what he did. He knows that and so do I. I even explained that to the lawyer that I spoke with. I was asked to explain my friends childhood to the court and I did. That doesn't mean that I expect leniency and I know he doesn't either.

To call it regrettable is an understatement. So many lives have been destroyed by that one terrible act. Many more lives have been turned upside down. I take something away from this though. I realized maybe a little late that I will make time when my friends are in need. I will sit and listen if they have a problem, and I'll do my best to offer up a solution and if nothing else an ear. I can't change what happened but I can change my response to it for the next time. Lessons learned are sometimes hard, and sometimes that's the only way we learn them.

So I file this away with the other black marks in my life, but this one has a flag on it. This is one to be remembered. This is my regret.....