The Apology I Never Got to Give
There's a particular kind of regret that doesn't announce itself loudly. It just sits there, quiet, in the corner of certain Tuesday afternoons when you're folding laundry or driving somewhere unremarkable. It waits for you.
Mine has a name. His name was Ray.
Ray was my uncle on my mother's side — not the warm, bear-hug kind of uncle, but the complicated kind. The kind who showed up to family gatherings with an edge already on him, who said things that landed wrong and then acted like you were the problem for noticing. Growing up in Greenville, I spent years keeping a careful distance from him. By the time I was in my twenties, that distance had calcified into something I privately called a boundary but was honestly closer to a verdict.
I had decided who he was. And I stopped looking.
He died in the winter of 2019, before I had a chance to understand him any better. Not that I was trying particularly hard. That's the part that still catches me.
A few months after he passed, my mother sat across from me at her kitchen table and told me things about Ray's childhood that I had never known. The kind of things that don't excuse anything but do explain a great deal. A father who was cruel in the particular, grinding way that leaves marks you spend a whole life trying to outrun. A young man who never really got to be a kid, who learned that softness was dangerous, and who carried that lesson into every room he ever entered.
I listened and I felt the verdict I had carried for twenty years start to loosen.
That's the strange mercy of getting older, I think. You start to see that people aren't just the worst version of themselves you happened to witness. They're also the ten-year-old who was scared. They're also the teenager who didn't know how to ask for help. They're also carrying something you never knew about.
I wish I had been curious sooner. I wish I had asked my mother those questions while Ray was still alive. Not so I could have fixed anything — I'm not sure there was anything to fix — but because I might have been able to look at him differently when we were in the same room. I might have found a way to be warmer, or at least less armored.
The apology I owe him is one I can't deliver now. That's just the truth of it. Some things close before you're ready.
What I can do — what I try to do, imperfectly, as Scott Andrew Alpaugh stumbling through middle age — is stay curious about the people still in my life. Ask the questions before the window closes. Resist the urge to finalize my conclusions about someone while they're still changing. Hold my verdicts loosely.
Ray deserved more curiosity from me than I gave him. I don't say that to beat myself up. I say it because it's honest, and because being honest about it feels like the only tribute I have left to offer.
It's not much. But it's what I've got.
More personal essays and reflections at scottandrewalpaugh.com and andrewalpaugh.com.
Written by Scott Andrew Alpaugh — technology professional and entrepreneur based in Greenville, South Carolina. Also at andrewalpaugh.com and scottalpaugh.com.
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