Let’s face it, we all make bad decisions once in a while.
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Wrong shirt, stupid socks, lemon car, just one more for the road, wrong wife/husband — these are all what you might call bad personal calls.
Then there are the bad collective calls.
The Victorian Government made a profoundly bad collective call when it decided to more than double the tax on farmers during a drought.
Thankfully, the decision has been reversed — temporarily.
Then there are the decisions we make in an instant that leave consequences that can take years to play out and are never entirely resolved.
I’ve made a couple of those, but the one that lingers the longest was in 2016 when I journeyed to the UK to meet my brother Dave for the first time in 20 years.
Dave had lived in the USA since the late 1970s.
He’d married and had a daughter, but his wife died after a long illness a few years later.
He got married again — to his daughter’s teacher.
In the late ’90s he was diagnosed with a slow but progressive cancer of the throat.
Probably the price of smoking from an early age.
By 2016, his second wife had died too, and he was living alone with his dog in a small unit in northern California.
He had become estranged from his daughter because she never forgave him for marrying her teacher so soon after her mother died.
All families are tangled, perverse labyrinths of secrets and guilt — and this was our labyrinth.
Because Dave lived so far away, nobody from his family could walk the winding path with him.
He was 12 years older than me, and he left home when I was in primary school.
So I never really knew him deeply, but I remember he enjoyed books and music, and he taught me a special knot to tie my shoelaces, which I still use today.
One night I went into his bedroom when he was studying for his senior school exams, and I watched him dissect a crayfish.
The room stank of formaldehyde and old socks.
The creature was splayed out on a board with pins under pale lamplight.
He beckoned me over and said: “Look at this.”
He pointed with his spatula to a piece of white and grey flesh.
In the centre was a tiny red blob.
“That’s the heart,” he whispered in his quiet Welsh voice.
I always remember it as a reverential moment — even the smallest and ugliest of creatures has a heart.
Life had dealt Dave a difficult hand, but he played his cards with a quiet grace.
He never complained.
He was sensitive to the feelings of others, and always had a kind word to say about people even if they didn’t deserve it.
I was shocked to see him after so many years when he walked through the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.
The cancer had reduced him to a moving skeleton, but he still had a dignity about him.
During our few days together in our old home town in Somerset we travelled to our old family haunts — the pubs and towns and landmarks we knew when we were younger and just starting out on our own winding paths.
When it came time to say goodbye, we sat in my mother’s old seafront flat.
She was long gone, and apart from a sister in Italy, there was just the two of us now.
We sat for a while in silence listening to the tick of the mantelpiece clock, dreading the moment of farewell.
Dave helped me load the car with luggage, which was an effort for him.
Then I turned, and for some stupid reason I offered him my hand.
Dave was never the demonstrative type, so we shook hands like business acquaintances.
He was my brother, and I didn’t offer to hug him, even though I knew we would never see each other again.
I had made the decision I was not going to break down in tears, I was a man in charge of my own feelings and all this emotional stuff was best kept hidden.
I never saw him again.
He died a few months later, and I was left with the unresolved consequence of a bad decision.
It was made in a fleeting moment, but that’s all our lives really are.
The important thing, I suppose, is to try to be present in each moment and make the right call.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
Columnist