My mother called me on a video call three days before she passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack, and I missed it because I was in a work meeting that, looking back now, genuinely was not important enough to have justified letting that particular call go to voicemail the way it actually did that day. I called her back about two hours later, we talked normally, nothing felt urgent or different in that return call at the time, and I had absolutely no way of actually knowing what was coming so soon afterward.
Logically I understand completely that missing one specific call, especially one I did return within a couple of hours, is not actually connected to what happened three days later in any real causal sense whatsoever. But some part of me keeps returning to that exact missed call specifically, wondering what she might have actually wanted to say in that particular moment that maybe never got said in quite the same way during our return conversation later that same day.
My siblings have been supportive, reminding me that we talked regularly overall and that our relationship was genuinely good right up until the end, which is completely true and something I do hold onto on better days when this feeling recedes somewhat naturally on its own. But grief apparently does not always respond cleanly to logic the way I might have expected it to before actually going through something like this myself directly.
I have started leaving my phone somewhere I can actually hear it now, even during meetings, a small, probably excessive habit that I know will not undo anything from the past, but that gives me some sense of control going forward that I clearly did not have in that specific moment three days before she passed away.
Has anyone else carried this specific kind of guilt around a small, ordinary moment that happened to sit right before a genuinely major loss, and does it actually get easier to hold with time, or does it just become something you learn to carry differently rather than something that ever fully resolves?