Someone once said to me, “Everybody, every day, does the very best they can do.”
At first I couldn’t agree, because the world is filled with slackers, malingerers and lazy louts who are just getting by. You’ve seen them, right?
As a high-school teacher for 34 years, I had seen endless kids who did only enough to get by. Some did nothing more than lay their heads on the desk to sleep. I was also a soccer coach, and I saw some players whose performance today was far short of what it was last week.
But when I pulled them aside to ask how they were doing, I often learned that they were doing the very best they could manage to do that day, even if it wasn’t much.
Maybe Dad didn’t come home last night.
Maybe Mom didn’t make breakfast for them, and left only an empty wine bottle on the kitchen table for them to wake up to.
Maybe their girlfriend broke up with them that morning.
Or maybe someone sent a text that said they were fat and ugly.
“And so, today (I’m sorry), this is the best effort I have to offer,” they said with every gesture. Sometimes I never got the full reason why their best wasn’t all that good. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a reason.
I was a teacher and coach, not a counselor. But still, it was my job to try to coax a little “better” from their “best.” And sometimes, all it took was a bit of patient understanding from me to help make their day — and their effort — better.
I thought of those students on Valentine’s Day, when I told Beth I was sorry for not doing better.
My old friends Jim and Beth had come from Phoenix to spend some time with me. Beth was my wife’s best friend, Jim is my fishing buddy, and long ago they were our next-door neighbors for 27 years.
They were the last visitors to our home only a few days before my wife suffered a fatal stroke on Valentine’s Day last year. And now Jim and Beth were here again, visiting me on Valentine’s Day this year, exactly one year later.
When Beth asked how I was getting along without Gail, I said, “Well, I’m doing alright, thanks to old and new friends. But she’s always with me, in a way. Every evening I take a walk and I say to her: ‘I love you. I’m sorry. And thanks.’”
Beth smiled, but she said, “I understand the love and the thanks…but sorry?” She knew I was Gail’s dedicated full-time caregiver through her heart problems, cancer and strokes over a 12-year span. “You were always so good with her,” she said. “What do you have to be sorry for?”
I explained that I meant I was sorry she had to suffer so much. But I was also sorry that, although I did my best every day, sometimes my best wasn’t all that good, due to exhaustion, frustration, or just blind fury at God or the fates or the universe for making life so impossibly hard for any normal human to bear.
It wasn’t Gail’s fault that life was so hard. She deserved better. I had made a promise to her almost 50 years ago. And because some days I wasn’t at my best, I felt sorry.
“You gave Gail all you had to give,” Beth said to me. And that was true.
“And because you loved her so much, you wanted to give her more than any human can give.” And that was true, too.
“And because you gave all that you could give, you only have to forgive yourself for being human, and for being limited as all humans are. Because you did your very best, every single day.”
And that, too, was true.
Other patient, understanding friends — Mike, Bill, MaryAnn, Carol — have also told me that, but it was good to hear it from Gail’s best friend. And thanks to their patient understanding, my “best” today is better than it would be without them and others.
After Jim and Beth left, I took a long walk just after sundown. It was one full year since Gail passed, and as always, I whispered to the fading sky: “Love. Sorry. Thanks.”
And although my “love” was eternal, I felt my “sorry” shift away from apology, to regret.
But beyond that, I felt that my thanks had changed somewhat, too.
Because at long last I could thank Gail not just for giving me 50 years of her life as my closest companion, but also for allowing me to forgive myself for being human, and for releasing me from my guilt as I move on.
