ABSTRACT
Unmasking the subterfuge takes conceptual and emotional effort. Nobody has clarified any better than T. S. Eliot the futility of merely hankering over an abstract empty possibility: “what might have been”. Cultivating regret and indulging in forgetting serve the same purpose of promoting obscurity so that we might “play ‘lying dead’” about cowardice or greatest weakness. The luxury of forgetting painful events and burying them in regret perform the same psychological service. The power of regret and the strength of anticipation are existentially proportionate. Subsequent wise choices in loving brighten any lingering dark melancholy with a gentle patina. In the deepest sense, people never totally overcome the regretful situation. Honesty blunts bitterness and transforms regret into the joy of seasoned nostalgia. In the blink of an eye, the highest hopes transmute into the deepest regret, even as an ardently desired possibility vanishes.
