Living With The Crack: Wabi-Sabi And My Longest Regret

Before I turned forty, the heaviest thing I carried was not a failed project or a missed opportunity. It was the memory of my mother’s final years.

When she was diagnosed with cancer in her early fifties, my father and I refused to accept reality. Even after a top specialist told us in the second year that aggressive treatments would only cause more pain, we refused to stop. We kept her in hospital beds and subjected her to endless procedures for five long years. Even in her final moments, her body was still covered in tubes.

Until the day she died, my mother had never been on an airplane. The farthest place she had ever visited was a national park just three hundred kilometers from home.

For a long time, I carried this grief and guilt. I kept thinking about the peaceful, happy days we could have given her if we had simply stopped trying to fix what could not be fixed.

Eventually, I realized I will carry this regret for the rest of my life. But surprisingly, I no longer feel the need to wash it away.

This is not a lesson on how to handle regret. It is simply a reflection on what happens when we stop fighting our past, and how Wabi-Sabi helped me see that a life does not need to be perfect—or even complete.

The Illusion of Control

Looking back, I often ask myself why my father and I fought the doctors’ advice so fiercely. At the time, we told ourselves it was out of love. We believed that stopping treatment meant giving up on her, and no good husband or son would ever do that.

But over the years, as the noise of that crisis quieted down, I began to see a harder truth beneath that love.

What we were really doing was trying to control something entirely beyond us. We were terrified of facing the absolute uncertainty of death. Admitting that medicine had reached its limits meant admitting that we were helpless. So instead of sitting with that painful reality, we chose action. We chose more scans, more medications, and more treatments—anything that gave us the illusion that we were still in charge.

We treated her illness like a technical problem to be solved. In our panic to save her life, we forgot to let her actually live. We traded her comfort, her freedom, and her dignity for five years of artificial hope inside hospital walls.

This is the hidden cost of the urge to control. When we refuse to accept reality, we end up causing more pain to the people we love—and to ourselves.

Related Post: Loosening My Grip: On Loss, Growth, and Self-Acceptance

Holding my mother’s hand.

Carrying the Stain

For years after she died, this guilt followed me everywhere. Every time I saw an airplane in the sky, or read about someone traveling with their elderly parents, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I kept asking myself the same question: Why didn’t we just let her go home?

I tried to reason with myself. I told myself that we didn’t know any better back then, or that anyone else would have done the same. But none of that helped. The regret remained.

Eventually, I stopped trying to make excuses.

The truth is, what we did was a mistake, and this regret is a real stain on my life. I no longer try to dress it up or hide it. I have also stopped expecting my life to be spotless.

I am willing to live with this stain for the rest of my days. It hurts, but it also keeps my mother close to me. Because of this pain, I never forget her. It brings back her voice, her face, and the ordinary days we spent together.

I no longer need a clean past without scars. This is a part of my story with her, and I will carry it for as long as I live.

The Beauty of Broken Things

It was only much later that I encountered the idea of Wabi-Sabi.

At its core, Wabi-Sabi is an ancient lens that honors what is incomplete, impermanent, and imperfect. It challenges our modern obsession with seamlessness, symmetry, and progress. We are taught to fix whatever is broken, to polish away every flaw, and to view any mistake as a failure. But Wabi-Sabi operates on a very different premise: nothing in nature is ever whole, permanent, or finished.

Trees do not grow in straight lines. Rivers do not flow in perfect geometries. Weathering, erosion, and fracture are not defects in the natural world. They are the evidence of life itself.

When I looked at my own past through this lens, something quieted down inside me.

I realized I had been judging my life against an imaginary blueprint of perfection—a world where every choice was right, every farewell was gentle, and every story ended neatly. But that blueprint was never real.

My mother’s illness and the choices we made are part of the raw material of my life. This regret is not a design flaw to be erased. It is simply how time landed on us.

Wabi-Sabi didn’t make my guilt disappear, nor did it erase the loss. But it taught me to stop expecting a life without cracks. It allowed me to look at my broken past not with shame, but with simple acceptance.