Don’t miss the moment

If only. The full weight of regret is often reckoned in these two

words.

We may have left undone that thing we ought to have done, or done

that thing we ought not to have done. I’m paraphrasing the 1928

Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, which characterizes our commonplace

failings so well.

We cost ourselves a pound of flesh. We lament. We mourn.

If we believe in God, we may drag our bruised soul to him for

solace and mending, much the way we once limped with a skinned,

oozing knee to our mother.

No amount of regret ever turns back the clock. Yet the passage of

time seldom keeps us from wondering what -- spared our own

self-interest or self-absorption -- might have been.

On a recent Saturday, I was sitting on a bus outside the Gaylord

Texan Hotel and Resort in Dallas next to a friend and columnist,

Norris Burkes. In Texas for the National Society of Newspaper

Columnists convention, we were about to embark on a guided tour of

historic downtown Grapevine. After that, we would visit the Sixth

Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which houses exhibits on the

assassination and legacy of John F. Kennedy, in the former Texas

School Book Depository from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot the

president in 1963.

As we waited for our bus to depart, Norris asked me if I’d seen

NBC anchor Brian Williams’ interview with Christian evangelist Billy

Graham the night before.

I hadn’t. I’d been a happy captive at a party in the convention’s

hospitality suite, presided over by Diane Ketcham, former columnist

at The New York Times and now the society’s Lifetime Director of Fun.

Norris was still pondering Graham’s answer to a question Williams

posed to him. The anchor asked Graham if there was any one moment

with a U.S. president that stood out for him. Graham’s answer was the

story of a moment missed.

“I had spoken at a breakfast, and John Kennedy was sitting beside

me,” Graham told Williams. “He whispered to me; he said, ‘Will you

ride back to the White House with me?’ And I said, ‘You know, Mr.

President ... I’m sick ... I have a fever, and I don’t think I ought

to ride in the car with you and go to the White House. Let me come

over some other time.’ And he smiled, and he said, ‘OK.’ And I have

often wondered what did he want to talk about?”

Oswald shot Kennedy before Graham got a second chance to visit

with the president.

If only Graham could have known. If only he’d taken that drive to

the White House with the president.

What Kennedy wanted to talk about, “that, to me, is a mystery that

I would like cleared up when I get to heaven,” Graham told Williams.

I think we all have at least one mystery like this we’ll carry to

heaven’s gate. One of mine involves my father.

Seven years ago, I spent one of many nights with my father at the

Talbert Medical Center, where he was treated at times during his

six-month battle with lung cancer. We’d sent my mother home to get

some rest.

After my father drifted to sleep, I dozed off in my chair until he

called to me sometime later for help with the bedpan. As I emptied

the pan in the bathroom and washed it, I could hear a rustling sound

of him moving in the bed; he seemed agitated.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as I came alongside the bed.

“You shouldn’t have to be doing this,” he said.

“Why not?” I said.

I smiled at him when a moment had passed, and he hadn’t found

something more to say. He smiled back and took my hand and tried to

squeeze it hard. I laid my head on his frail chest. I’d spent days

and weeks and months trying not to cry, but now I did.

“Michele,” my father said, “no matter what happens, you’ll always

be my little girl.”

Then I heard him labor to gather his breath, about to say

something more, just as a nurse barged into the room, turning out the

comfortable darkness around us with the flip of a switch on his way

in.

I lifted my head off the bony pillow of my father’s ribs. I

self-consciously blotted my tears as I returned to my chair.

While the nurse took his blood pressure, drew blood and changed

his IVs, my father slipped back into sleep.

“She loves her daddy,” the nurse said to me, smiling and winking

as he left the room.

Yes, she does, I thought as I sat again in the darkness. And she

wants to know what her daddy was about to say when you rushed into

the room.

No wayto turn back the clock. But the passage of time, seven years

now, has never kept me from wondering what it was my father wanted to

say -- those words forever lost this side of heaven’s gate.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].