I think that we all have regrets in our lives with regard to presence. If you feel like sharing some, please do so.

I’ll be avoiding one this weekend, as I go to see my grandmother in the hospital. She had colon surgery a couple weeks ago, and was in a nursing home to convalesce. [Okay, so it's more complicated than that, but that's all the detail that I want to go into here.] The other day, she had a seizure and was taken to the local hospital. At present, she’s unresponsive, though it’s unclear as to whether that her unresponsiveness is due to the seizure or the anti-seizure medications. She doesn’t even recognize her daughter.

The regret that I’d be avoiding? I do not want the last time that I saw my maternal grandmother to have been at my paternal grandfather’s funeral.

Now, I might be taking this unresponsive bit too far, and she might be back to her normal, nagging self in another couple weeks. But then she might not.

To be honest, I never was real convinced of the mortality of either of my grandfathers before they died. With my mother’s dad, he’d battled cancer for 11 years in a time much earlier than the present day; it seemed that no loss of body parts much fazed him. I was honestly in disbelief that he would die when he did. With my father’s dad, he’d had so many strokes that we’d lost count, and frankly none of them had ever been that stout.

I was wrong on both counts.

Never put yourself in a situation to regret not having seen loved ones, unless you absolutely cannot avoid it. Hopefully that’s a lesson that you can learn from my words, rather than having to touch that hot burner for yourself.