On February 14, 2017, we celebrated my mom and dad’s 64th wedding anniversary. The family gathered around the kitchen table, toasted their long-term good fortune and reminisced. Each memory was punctuated with a smile, laugh or tear. The rhythmic sound of an oxygen tank hummed in the background, pumping air into my mother’s deteriorating lungs through tubing that snaked throughout the house. At one point she stared into the distance and quietly said, “I want a do-over.”

I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly. “What did you just say?”

“I want a do-over,” she repeated. After a brief pause, she added, “There’s so much I didn’t know.”

What she did know is that she was in the last phase of her life. Within months she’d succumb to pneumonia, her lungs and immune system too weak to fight the infection. She never brought the subject up again, but the do-over statement has stayed with me.

If she had a second chance, I believe she would have made the same life choices of marriage and family. My mom and dad truly loved each other. Two years after her death, my heart-broken 97-year-old father still makes mix CDs for her, rearranging the songs of their youth to tell their love story. And while family meant everything to them, I believe my mother would have chosen to show up differently.

My mom was born in 1928 and grew up during the Great Depression followed by World War II. When she married my father in the early 1950s, societal expectations defined her life as a mother and homemaker, despite her pre-marital career as a milliner in New York City.

I think my mom’s dying regrets were about living a life more aligned with her desires and creative impulses versus what was expected of her. I don’t know what her dreams were, but my guess is that something deep in her core was not honored and left unfulfilled. Is it a coincidence that the lung disease that took her was related to the inability to take life (air) in?

She would have turned 91 this week. As her birthday nears, I still feel relief that her physical suffering has ended. I know she’s close, looking after my father as he continues to grieve her death.

Perhaps her do-over wish was less about her unfulfilled dreams and more of a warning to her daughter. Perhaps it was meant as encouragement to take more risks while I am able. Perhaps it was a reminder that life is all about choice and it’s up to me to choose wisely so when it comes time to leave this earth I do so with no regrets.

Journal Reflections: What lessons can you learn from your ancestors or family members? If you were at end of life, are there areas where you would want a do-over? What can you do today to begin to address them?

A Do-Over Wish