The Years I Cannot Get Back

I have been thinking about regret.

Not just the regret of making a wrong decision, but of realising you had opportunities to make a different one and didn’t.

Because someone told you to be patient, to manage, to pray, to have faith, and you did.

Until one day, you looked around and realised that the years had passed, nothing much had changed, and everyone who encouraged you to endure had continued living their own lives.

Life na per head.

I know a woman in her sixties whom people describe as bitter.

She talks about her marriage often. About the sacrifices she made, the opportunities she turned down, the years she spent waiting for things to get better, and people are tired of hearing it.

They say she complains too much, that she should let go of the past, that there’s no point talking about things she cannot change and perhaps they’re right about the last part. She cannot change the past. But I wonder whether the people who call her bitter have ever really considered what she’s grieving.

She married at 21.

At an age when many people are still discovering themselves, she was already making decisions that would shape the rest of her life. Then came years of separation and uncertainty. She waited, fought for the relationship, sacrificed financially and turned down opportunities to begin again. And when the waiting ended, the life she had hoped for didn’t quite begin.

Instead, there were more responsibilities. More sacrifices and more reasons to be patient. She worked, provided and found ways to keep her family going, sometimes at enormous personal cost. And through it all, she hoped that someday things would be different.

I wonder how many times she told herself, Just a little longer.

Today, she is older, unwell and physically diminished by the life she has lived, And she talks. Oh, she talks about what she endured, what she could have done differently and the life she might have had.

People call it bitterness but I wonder whether some of it is grief. Because what do you call the pain of mourning a life you never got to live? A life that was not taken from you in one dramatic moment, but surrendered gradually. Through one more year of waiting, one more opportunity declined, one more sacrifice made in the hope that things would improve. Until the years became decades, and suddenly, there was no going back.

I think that’s one of the cruelest things about regret. It often comes with the clarity you desperately needed years earlier. 

You can see the warning signs now. You remember the moments when you wanted to walk away. The conversations, the advice, the assurances. You remember what you knew but refused to accept. And perhaps you even remember the exact moment when you could have chosen differently. But you didn’t.

Now, you cannot be 25 again, you cannot return to 30 and make another decision and you cannot reclaim the energy, opportunities or experiences that belonged to a particular season of your life.

People will tell you it’s never too late, and sometimes, they’re right. But I have learned that sometimes, it is too late for certain things. I wish we could acknowledge that without rushing to make everyone feel better.

There are opportunities that expire, experiences that cannot be recreated, years that cannot be recovered, no matter how much wisdom we gain from losing them. And I don’t think we should dismiss that loss by insisting that everything happens for a reason. Because the truth is that sometimes, things happen because we made choices. 

We may have made those choices with limited information, or maybe because we were afraid, or probably because we trusted people who didn’t understand what they were asking us to endure. This last part really troubles me because it’s easy to tell someone to manage when you are not the one managing.

Easy to recommend patience when you’re not the one waking up every morning to the same circumstances. 

Easy to say, Have faith, when you’re not the one carrying the consequences of what you’re asking someone else to call faith.

And isn’t it interesting how some people encourage others to tolerate things they would never accept for themselves?

They’ll tell a woman to stay, to pray harder, to be more understanding, to think about the children. And perhaps, years later, when she has become exhausted and resentful, those same people will wonder why she’s so bitter.

Madam, you’ve talked about this enough.

You need to move on.

You can’t keep living in the past.

Haba na!

You encouraged her to spend years enduring a situation, and now you’re impatient with how long it’s taking her to come to terms with those years?

Of course, not everyone who advised her to stay was necessarily wrong at the time. Some genuinely believed things could improve. Others may not have understood the full situation. And ultimately, the decisions were hers.

That’s the uncomfortable truth.

People can advise you, love you, pray with you and walk beside you but nobody can experience your life on your behalf.

Nobody else feels where your shoe pinches quite the way you do. And when everyone goes home, you remain inside your own life.

Life na per head.

I wonder whether that is what this woman has finally understood. That the people whose opinions mattered so much when she was younger were never going to live the life those opinions helped shape.

Perhaps she’s angry with them. Perhaps she’s angry with her husband. Perhaps she’s angry with herself.

I suspect the last one may be the hardest.

Because how do you forgive yourself for the years you believe you gave away? How do you stop thinking about the person you might have become? How do you look at your younger self and resist the urge to ask, Why didn’t you leave?

I don’t have an easy answer.

And I hesitate to tell someone who has spent decades enduring disappointment that she should simply choose happiness. As though happiness were waiting somewhere and she had merely refused to collect it.

But I also wonder what happens when regret becomes the only story we tell about our lives.

When every conversation returns to what we lost. When the people around us begin to withdraw because they no longer know what to say.

Perhaps that’s another tragedy.

The woman who spent so many years feeling unsupported may now find herself increasingly alone because her pain has become difficult for others to sit with.

I don’t think calling her bitter helps. But I also don’t think resentment should be allowed to consume whatever remains of her life.

Both things can be true.

She has every reason to grieve what she lost. And she deserves whatever peace is still possible for her. Not because the past no longer matters, but because it has already taken so much.

I think about the young woman she once was.

Twenty-one and full of whatever hopes she carried into marriage. I wonder what she imagined her life would look like at sixty.

Whether she pictured herself resting, enjoying the fruits of her labour, surrounded by the comfort of a life built together.

And I wonder what she would say if she could sit across from that younger version of herself today.

Would she tell her to leave? Would she tell her to wait, but not forever? Or would she simply hold her and cry? I don’t know.

But I think about the people who are still young enough to make decisions this woman wishes she had made.

The ones who know something is wrong but keep postponing a decision because someone has told them to endure. And I want to ask them something. Not whether they should leave. I don’t know their circumstances well enough to decide that. But whether they have considered what their lives might look like if nothing changes.

Not next month, not next year, but ten years from now, or even twenty.

Because patience can be a beautiful thing. Faith, too, but neither should require us to stop thinking, asking questions or acknowledging reality.

As for the woman everyone calls bitter, I wish she could find some tenderness for the young woman who made those decisions, even if she can never agree with them. I wish the years she has left could hold something other than regret.

I don’t know whether that will happen.

But when she talks about the years she cannot get back, I find it difficult to tell her to stop.

Perhaps she’s still trying to understand how she got here.

And perhaps, before asking her to move on, we could acknowledge that she has lost something she can never recover.

Time. Her time. And no amount of advice can give it back.