Reparative Work Should Honor the Person Harmed, Not Relieve Guilt

Gregg Ward arrived at a demanding test for what to do with regret: make a positive difference in the way the person harmed would have done if they had lived, or in the way they would have urged you to act.

Ward came to that distinction after years of trying to do useful work as a theater artist, writer and trainer on leadership and respect. Looking back, he says he distrusts his own motive. Even where the work was worthwhile, he believes he was unconsciously using it to feel better about himself and to persuade others that he was a good person.

His research into moral injury—the experience of intentionally or unintentionally breaking one’s own personal moral code—gave him another way to think about the problem. Rather than treating good works as a route to relief from guilt, he wanted the work to be wholly about Michelle: the person he says he killed in a car accident as a young man.

Seven years ago, Ward started an arts scholarship in Michelle’s name at their high school. She had wanted to become a professional artist, he says, and the scholarship feels like the action she would have wanted.

Ward regrets not reaching that understanding sooner. Good works, in his account, are not defined only by their outcome; their purpose matters. The question is what—or whom—they are for.

Gregg Ward begins with a refusal to minimize regret. He takes issue with the cultural instinct to treat it as something trivial or easily set aside; in his experience, regret can become central to identity and shape a person’s work, relationships and daily life.

His own regret is inseparable from a specific event. Driving home late one night with his high-school sweetheart, Michelle, Ward says he paid more attention to her than to the road, went off the road and struck a telephone pole. She died.

For decades, Ward says, he was at times overwhelmed by guilt, shame, sorrow and self-loathing. He felt little self-respect and a desperate need to repay the life he believed he had taken. At Michelle’s funeral, a woman told him not to blame himself: it was not his fault, she said, and God wanted Michelle in heaven. Ward understood that she was trying to comfort him, but could not accept the reassurance.

The advice he heard repeatedly—to forgive himself—also failed him. To Ward, self-forgiveness sounded like making an excuse for his failure or deliberately letting himself off the hook. He says he was wholly responsible for what happened that night and always will be.

What changed was not his view of responsibility but his view of what responsibility demanded. A friend asked him, soon after the accident, “What have you learned, and what are you going to do about it?” Ward calls the questions harsh, and says he was then too consumed by grief and shame to answer them. They nevertheless contain the alternative he eventually adopted.

Ward distinguishes accountability from both denial and self-destruction. People can ignore regret, dismiss it or allow it to undermine their work and relationships indefinitely. Or, he says, they can own their mistakes, help those they harmed where they can, make amends where possible and seek to make a positive difference. His account retains culpability while rejecting permanent self-punishment as its only meaningful expression.

Gregg Ward says he spent many years believing he was alone in having accidentally killed someone. He later learned of the Hyacinth Fellowship, a group for people dealing with accidental killings, and attended its first in-person gathering in Detroit. He describes the members as ordinary, caring people from different walks of life trying to find a way forward.

That experience sharpened his view that people are poorly equipped to discuss regret. Accidental killing is, he stresses, “very, very serious,” but he sees a broader problem: people who have caused unintentional harm often do not speak about it until they are near death, when they may be trying to acknowledge mistakes or make amends. By then, he says, it is usually too late.

One member of the fellowship, whom Ward calls Marie, was a year removed from a collision in which a motorcyclist t-boned her car and died instantly. She later learned that two cars had crashed at the same location and that both drivers had died. Her first thought, she told the group, was relief that neither person would have to live with guilt. Ward says the others understood exactly what she meant.

The fellowship also supplies examples of the outward-facing response Ward describes. Marie is now researching practical ways to make roads safer for motorcyclists. Other members have become lay pastors, counselors and mentors to people still living with their own accidental killings. They have turned regret toward work intended to reduce harm or help others carry it.