Library of Wisdom
Hard-earned lessons from lives shared by choice — every card donated deliberately by its author, with the whole life behind it. The Library is young; it grows one life at a time.
5 cards from 3 lives on regret & forgiveness.
Regret & forgiveness · Family rifts & reconciliation
Apologizing from the pulpit
In 1989 I preached hard against a kind of man, and my son heard it as a sermon against himself, and he was not wrong to. He left that afternoon — the church first, then the city, then the calling distance. It took me eleven years to understand the wound and four more to do the only thing equal to it: I stood in that same pulpit and said I had been wrong, by name, with him not even in the building. People ask why public, when the harm felt private. Because the harm was not private — I had armed a whole room. A private apology repairs a relationship. A public one repairs the pulpit. I owed both, and I paid the second one first because it was harder.
— Rev. James E. Caldwell · AME Zion pastor, forty-four years — Richmond, VirginiaDemonstration
Regret & forgiveness · Family rifts & reconciliation
What I never told my father
My old man hit Okinawa and never said one word. I came home from my war and never said one word. Two silent men at one kitchen table for twenty-five years, each one protecting the other from a thing the other one already knew by heart. He died in '96. I'd trade a year of what I've got left to do one of those Sunday dinners over and say it plain: I know, Pop. Me too. That's all it would have taken. Five words. We had twenty-five years and neither of us spent the five words.
To someone younger: If both of you already know, one of you has to say it. Be the one.
— Frank Moretti · Marine, tool-and-die maker, grandfather — Toledo, OhioDemonstration
Grief & loss · Regret & forgiveness
The two names
There are two names on the Wall I read every time I'm in Washington. Tommy Kowalski, and a kid from Georgia we called Brick because of how he swam. You don't get over it. Anybody tells you that you get over it, walk away from that person, they have nothing for you. What you do is carry it. And after enough years the carrying stops being a weight and starts being part of your legs. You walk different. You walk anyway.
— Frank Moretti · Marine, tool-and-die maker, grandfather — Toledo, OhioDemonstration
Marriage & partnership · Regret & forgiveness
On being married to someone who was also married to a company
Maria says she spent twenty years married to a man who was always slightly somewhere else, and she's right. We made it because every time she hit her limit, she said so in plain words, and I came back. It took the plain words twice. The company was the other woman — and unlike most other women, everyone congratulates you for the affair. Nobody at the chamber of commerce dinner is checking on your wife.
To someone younger: Don't ask them to be patient. Ask them what it's costing, and listen to the whole answer.
— Marcus Reyes · Built a freight company for nineteen years, then sold itDemonstration
Leadership & mentoring · Regret & forgiveness
On firing a friend
I waited eighteen months too long to fire Danny, because he was my friend, and I called the waiting loyalty. It wasn't loyalty. It was cowardice with better PR, and everyone underneath him paid the bill for it. When I finally did it, he said the thing I still carry: "You let me fail in front of everyone for a year and a half." Firing him was right. The waiting was the cruelty.
To someone younger: The kind thing and the comfortable thing are almost never the same thing.
— Marcus Reyes · Built a freight company for nineteen years, then sold itDemonstration