Coming Home to Story

The questions we ask, the stories we tell, and the choices we make are fateful.

Robert Frost used the metaphor of standing at the point where two roads diverge in a wood. The traveler must decide which to take. It is simply not possible to take both. Chris and I made such a fateful choice when, on the day she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, I asked her to marry me and she said “Yes.”

I like Frost’s poetry and The Road Not Taken has been a favourite for years. I used to be entranced by the idea that I had chosen the road less travelled (whatever that means) as though that made me somehow special. But I have let that fancy go.

What matters more to me now, is less the moment of choice than making a sustained and whole-hearted commitment to follow the road that has been chosen. Frost called his poem The Road Not Taken and the language has a wistful quality as though he will forever be wondering where the other road might have led.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

As a melancholic, I understand where that wistfulness comes from, but living with Chris taught me that regretting the lives we have not lived is a poor substitute for relishing the ones we have. We had a year as husband and wife and in the end it was enough to transform us both. It would be truer (if less poetic) to declare:

I shall be telling this, I forsee
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and we—
We took the same one, you and me,
And that has made all the difference.