A sign in front of Penn's mini LOVE sculpture asks, "What do you regret?" I thought of Aunt Martha.
On Christmas day when I was eight years old, I got two hamsters, whom I named Cousin Bessie and Aunt Martha. While my family was moving when I was nine, they died.
At first I denied the grief I felt, and flushed Aunt Martha down the toilet. Then I felt terrible about this. I think I asked my mother if it would be possible to retrieve her and was told it wasn't. But I compensated by burying Cousin Bessie in a little shoe box in the back yard.
So, after seeing the sign and the sculpture festooned with people's regrets on sticky notes, I wrote my own note on the back of a receipt (since there were no stickies left) and added it to the others.
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