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Confessions of an Accidental Killer | Gregg Ward | TED
Confessions of an Accidental Killer | Gregg Ward | TED
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Subtitle (186)
0:04
So there's this very famous song.
0:06
I'm sure you're all familiar with it.
0:08
It’s called “My Way” by Frank Sinatra.
0:11
Now I love it,
0:13
but there's one line in that song that has always bothered me.
0:18
It goes like this.
0:20
(Sings) “Regrets,
0:22
I've had a few.
0:25
But then again, too few to mention."
0:30
Regrets.
0:32
I've had a few.
0:35
But then again, too few to mention?
0:38
Now hang on a second.
0:40
I am pretty certain that Frank Sinatra had more than a few regrets
0:45
(Laughter)
0:46
Including hanging out with shady mafiosos.
0:49
So there's that.
0:52
But that song, and society in general,
0:56
encourages us to minimize regret,
1:00
as if they really don't have an impact on our lives.
1:04
But that's just not true.
1:06
For many of us,
1:07
regrets are at the core of our identity
1:10
and have a huge impact on our work,
1:13
our relationships and how we live our lives.
1:18
I certainly have a few.
1:20
Some aren't very important.
1:23
I regret eating a box of donuts
1:25
right before my annual physical last year.
1:28
(Laughter)
1:30
Some are a little bit more serious.
1:32
I regret not spending more time with my son after my divorce.
1:39
But I have one deep regret
1:42
that goes right to the heart of what I'm talking about today.
1:49
You see,
1:52
I'm an accidental killer.
1:55
When I was a young man,
1:57
I was driving home late one night
2:00
with my high school sweetheart, Michelle.
2:04
And I was paying more attention to her than I was to my driving.
2:10
And I went off the road,
2:13
and I hit a telephone pole.
2:16
And she died.
2:20
For decades after that,
2:23
there were times where I was completely overwhelmed
2:26
and brought to my knees by incredible guilt,
2:30
paralyzing shame and sorrow and regret.
2:35
A lot of self-loathing.
2:37
Not very much self-respect.
2:40
And a desperate need to do whatever I could
2:44
to pay back the life that I took.
2:49
And for many years, I thought I was the only one in this situation.
2:54
I was wrong.
2:57
Every single year,
2:58
people in the US accidentally kill someone.
3:02
And many more are seriously injured or permanently disabled
3:07
because someone made an unintentional mistake,
3:11
just like me.
3:14
We all belong to a club that we never wanted to join.
3:20
And recently I found out that that club has a name.
3:25
It's called the Hyacinth Fellowship.
3:28
And last fall, I had the opportunity
3:30
to attend their first annual in-person gathering in Detroit.
3:35
All perfectly normal, reasonable,
3:39
caring people from all walks of life
3:42
coming together to try to figure out a way
3:47
to move forward and to cope through their own accidental killings.
3:53
One woman I met there, let's call her Marie,
3:56
she was just one year out from having had a motorcyclist
4:00
T-bone, her car, dying instantly.
4:04
And she told us that she had recently found out
4:08
that two cars had collided in that exact same spot
4:12
not long after her accident,
4:14
and both the drivers had died.
4:17
And she said her very first thought was,
4:22
"Thank goodness they both died,
4:24
because then no one has to feel the guilt."
4:28
And we all nodded because we knew exactly how she felt.
4:34
And one of the realizations I took away with me from that gathering
4:38
is how ill-equipped we are as a society
4:41
to deal with regret.
4:44
Now accidentally killing someone is very, very serious.
4:49
But none of us are immune to regret.
4:53
Maybe, as I've been talking,
4:54
some of you here have been thinking about something
4:57
that happened in your life.
4:59
Some unintentional harm you caused someone that you truly regret,
5:03
that you wish you could take back and fix somehow.
5:08
The thing of it is,
5:10
most of us don't talk about our regrets
5:13
until maybe we're on our deathbed,
5:14
trying to own our mistakes and make amends.
5:18
But by then it's usually too late.
5:21
Or if we do talk about them,
5:24
we often get some really bad advice.
5:28
I remember one woman coming up to me at the funeral and saying,
5:34
"Don't blame yourself.
5:35
This isn't your fault.
5:37
God wanted her in heaven."
5:40
Now I know she was trying to make me feel better,
5:44
and I know she truly believed that.
5:47
But at that moment, all I could think was,
5:49
"Are you kidding me?"
5:52
But the really troubling piece of advice
5:55
that I got over and over and over again
6:00
was that I needed to forgive myself.
6:04
Huh.
6:06
Forgive myself.
6:08
That is the last thing I want to do.
6:12
You see, to me,
6:14
forgiving myself is somehow making an excuse for my failure
6:19
or deliberately letting myself off the hook
6:21
so I could feel better about me.
6:25
No, I was wholly responsible for what happened that night.
6:28
And I always will be.
6:31
So forgiving myself is off the table.
6:35
But what I always needed to know was how do I move forward in a positive way?
6:41
One thing I discovered is you can regret something
6:46
and hold yourself accountable for it,
6:48
but that doesn't mean you have to punish yourself
6:51
for the rest of your life.
6:54
You could learn from your regrets.
6:57
You could try to transform them or try to do something good with them.
7:02
You know, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got
7:05
came from a friend of mine in the form of two questions,
7:09
and he asked me this right after the accident.
7:12
He said, "So, dude, this happened to you.
7:16
What have you learned?
7:18
And what are you going to do about it?”
7:21
Pretty harsh, right?
7:24
Still, he had a point.
7:26
But I was too overcome with sorrow and regret and shame
7:32
to really think it through.
7:35
And that's the thing about regrets.
7:38
We can try to ignore them,
7:40
we can try to dismiss them,
7:43
we can even let them overwhelm us and undermine our relationships
7:47
and our work for the rest of our lives.
7:50
Or we can choose a different path forward.
7:54
To own our mistakes,
7:55
to do whatever we can to help those we harmed
7:59
and make amends any way we can,
8:01
and somehow try to make a positive difference in the world.
8:07
So the question then becomes, how?
8:11
Well, for many years, I tried to do "good works"
8:15
in my work as a professional theater artist and in my writing
8:19
and in my training programs on leadership and on respect.
8:24
But looking back on it now,
8:27
I think that all that good work I was doing
8:31
was unconsciously disingenuous.
8:35
You see, as good as they were, those things I was doing,
8:39
I think I was just doing them to make myself feel better about me
8:43
and to convince other people that I'm a good guy.
8:47
Which I am, just ask my three-month-old grandson.
8:50
(Laughter)
8:53
Eventually, after doing some research on something called “moral injury,”
8:59
which is where we intentionally
9:02
or unintentionally break our own personal moral code,
9:07
I realized that if I could make
9:09
a powerful, positive difference in the world
9:12
in the way that Michelle would have if she had lived
9:17
or would have told me to do, if she could,
9:20
then all the good I was doing would be wholly about her
9:25
and not about assuaging my guilt.
9:28
So what I did was, seven years ago,
9:31
I started an art scholarship in her name at our high school.
9:36
She wanted to be a professional artist,
9:38
and it feels like that's exactly what she would have wanted me to do.
9:53
And you know what I regret now?
9:59
Is not coming to that realization sooner.
10:05
Don't try to make the world better to make yourself feel better about you.
10:10
Change the world in the way that those you hurt would have done
10:14
or would have told you to do if they could.
10:19
The woman from the Hyacinth Fellowship I told you about,
10:23
well, she is now actively researching practical ways
10:28
to make our roadways safer for motorcyclists.
10:33
And many in the group have become lay pastors and counselors and mentors
10:37
to those who are still working their way through
10:40
their own accidental killings.
10:45
Regrets.
10:47
We all have a few, right?
10:50
And that's OK.
10:53
You can't change your past.
10:56
But you can use it to correct the future.
11:02
Thank you.
11:03
(Cheers and applause)
