The List I Keep Not Making

Somewhere between owing an apology and sending one, I've been stuck for years.

There’s a conversation I’ve rehearsed a hundred times and never had. It’s with one of my kids. I know the words. I just never say them out loud.

There’s writing I keep telling myself I’ll get to. There’s a friend I owe a real apology. Actual apologies, not the half kind. At 73, with two cancers living in my body, “later” isn’t the roomy word it used to be. I’ve caught myself using it anyway, exactly like I always did, like the runway was infinite.

Somebody wise once said not to count on cramming things in at the end. If it matters, do it now. I’ve built businesses on deadlines. Real ones, with real money attached. I never once told a client I’d get to their project “later,” with no date on it.

Yet that’s exactly how I’ve treated the people I owe an apology. No date. No plan. Just a soft word doing a lot of hiding.

The funny thing about later

The funny thing about later is that sometimes there is no later. That may be true for me the day either of these cancers decides to come back. I don’t know when that day is. Nobody does.

I keep asking myself why I don’t do the thing I know I should do. I know exactly what it is. I just never get around to it.

I’ve sold companies. I’ve raised kids, imperfectly, and I know it. I’ve stood in enough hard rooms that I’m not usually the guy who freezes. And yet this particular thing freezes me every time. A phone call. A few sentences. That’s all it would take, and I still don’t make it.

There’s something almost embarrassing about that gap. The size of the fear has nothing to do with the size of the task. I’ve noticed that mismatch before, in other parts of my life. I never expected to find it here too.

The apologies I owe

I owe apologies to people I’ve probably wronged. I have a ton of resistance to it. I think I know why I’m scared. I don’t want to hear the negative response. I don’t want someone to say, “You really blew it. You should’ve called years ago.”

That’s the fear in one sentence. It’s smaller than it sounds, and it still stops me cold.

I have a good, long-time boyhood friend. I know I should be having this conversation with him. When he was having trouble in his business, I wasn’t a supportive friend. I was the critic. I told him exactly what he was doing wrong.

I remember the tone I used. Confident, a little clipped, sure I was helping. I wasn’t asking him questions. I was handing him a diagnosis he didn’t ask for. He was scared for his livelihood at the time. What he needed was someone to sit with that fear. What he got, from me, was a business review.

I don’t blame him if he’s still holding that. If it were me, I would be. That friendship never officially ended. It just went quiet, the way things do when nobody names what happened. We still visit, we just never talk about the elephant in the room. (from my point of view)

My style hasn’t changed as much as I’d like

My straightforward, in-your-face style never showed much empathy. I still have that style. I’m still right in your face. I try to bring empathy to it now. I’m not sure what that means yet. I’m not sure what it looks like in practice.

I think in absolutes when I speak. That’s the honest description. It’s something I notice, and then I lose the thread, and then I notice it again.

Maybe the fix isn’t grand. Maybe it’s just this: sit down, write the list. Who do I owe, and for what. Do some research. Find out how it actually looked from the other side.

I think about doing this. Then I think about it again, and I get scared. That’s almost funny, given that from the outside it looks like I just never do anything. On the inside, there’s a lot going on. My friend from back when he needed support and I gave him judgment instead. A different friend I cut off over politics.

The mechanism, if I’m honest about it

It’s not dramatic, how the avoidance works. It’s almost boring, which is what makes it so effective. I think about my friend. There’s a real pull toward calling him. For a second, I mean to do it.

Then the second thought shows up. It says he’s probably moved on. It says this will be awkward. It says why stir it up now.

Then a third thought arrives, and it’s the sneaky one. It says I should think this through first. Plan what to say. Get it right.

That sounds responsible. It isn’t. It’s just fear wearing a suit. Planning becomes a very respectable way to never act. I’ve caught myself “getting ready” to call for years now. Getting ready isn’t the same as doing. I know that. I do it anyway.

The friend I cut off

I ended a friendship over a political disagreement, and I did it cleanly, the way I do most things. No ambiguity, no half-measures. Just a door closing.

I need to call these people. Or write. Or find some way back in. I have no idea how much time I have left. I do know it would be a shame to die without making the effort.

We used to talk every week. About business, about our kids, about nothing in particular. Then the conversation turned political one night, and I said something final. He said something final back.

I haven’t seen his handwriting in years. I don’t know if he still lives in the same house. Small facts like that pile up when you let a friendship go quiet long enough.

I keep thinking about how easy it was to end that friendship. One conversation, a little heat, and it was over. No cooling-off period. No second chance offered. That’s not how I want to handle things anymore. I don’t think it’s how I ever really wanted to handle them. It’s just how I was built, or how I built myself.

The apology I don’t want to be

I’ve been on the other end of this too. Plenty of people have apologized to me over the years. My father, specifically. I often didn’t feel like his apology was authentic. It had the shape of an apology. It didn’t have the weight of one.

It wasn’t one moment I can point to. It was a pattern, over years, of “sorry” showing up without much behind it. The words came out. Nothing in his actions ever moved.

I don’t want to be that guy. I want to be the one whose apology is authentic, whether or not it’s accepted. I want to know I did what I could with a given situation, win or lose. That’s a harder bar than it sounds. Saying the words is easy. Meaning them, in a way the other person can feel, is not.

I notice I inherited more from him than I’d like to admit. Not the specific pattern, but the ease. The ease of saying a thing without doing the harder work underneath it. I catch myself reaching for that shortcut too.

The list I haven’t written

I keep saying “the list” like it exists somewhere. It doesn’t. Not on paper, not in a note on my phone. Only in my head, where it’s easy to keep vague.

I think that vagueness is doing me a favor, and not the good kind. A name on paper is a debt. A name floating in my head is just a mood.

If I wrote it down, I’d have to look at the actual number. I’d have to write down what I actually did, not the soft version I tell myself in the shower. I haven’t done that yet. I keep meaning to. That sentence, by now, should sound familiar.

I picture the page. Two names on it right now, maybe three. A short line under each one, what I actually did. Not what I meant, not what the situation called for. What I did.

Even imagining that page makes my stomach tighten a little. Which tells me something about how honest that page would actually be, if I ever wrote it.

What actually surprised me

I expected the hard part to be finding the people. Tracking down addresses, phone numbers, whatever it takes after decades apart. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is that I’m still this scared. At 73. With cancer. I thought fear like this would have worn off by now, the way some fears do with age. It hasn’t.

I thought I’d have outgrown this. I haven’t. That’s the honest report from where I’m standing, not the tidy one.

I’ve faced two cancer diagnoses without falling apart. I’ve sat in oncology waiting rooms and kept my footing. So I assumed a phone call would be nothing by comparison. It isn’t nothing. It’s not close to nothing. Somehow the small, ordinary fear is holding up better than the big, dramatic one ever did.

I don’t fully understand that yet. I’m not sure I’m supposed to understand it before I act on it.

Where I actually am right now

I haven’t called my friend. I haven’t written the list. I haven’t done the research into what actually happened, from his side of things. I think about it. I think about it a lot. And then the day fills up, or the fear shows up first, and nothing moves.

That’s not a confession I’m proud of. It’s just where I am as I write this.

The apology conversation, wide open

I wonder how many other people carry this same list around in their heads. Not written down. Just rattling. I wonder what actually gets someone from carrying it to sending it. I don’t have that answer yet. I’m not going to pretend I do.

The worst that happens if I reach out is someone says, “I’m not interested.” Or something worse than that. I can survive worse than that. The best that happens is someone says, “I’ve been waiting thirty years to hear this.” I don’t know which one I’ll get. I won’t know until I try.

I try to picture the actual call sometimes. Dialing the number. Him picking up, maybe surprised to see my name. The first few seconds, before either of us knows what kind of call it is.

I get that far in my head and then I stop. I don’t let myself hear what he says next. That’s where the imagining always quits on me. And I’m an expert at living in my head.

I keep noticing that I’ve already survived every version of rejection I’m afraid of. I’ve been turned down in business. I’ve been told no by people I respected. None of that ever killed me. It stung, and then it passed, and I kept going. I have no real evidence that this would be different.

Knowing that hasn’t moved me an inch. The phone is still sitting there, untouched.

What I’m not ready to claim

It would be tempting to wrap this up with a lesson for my kids. Some piece of wisdom, earned the hard way, worth passing down. I don’t think I’ve earned that yet. I haven’t made the list. I haven’t made the call. I haven’t done the thing.

I’m not in a position to hand anyone a lesson about apologies when I’m still just thinking about mine. Thinking, and not doing, on a loop.

Not a lesson passed down, then. Just an admission, rattling around, that I haven’t acted on what I already know. I don’t know if that changes by the time you read this. I genuinely don’t. I’m writing this from inside the stuck part, not looking back at it from the other side.

The arithmetic

At minimum, two people are on this list right now. My boyhood friend. The friend I cut off over politics. There are almost certainly more I haven’t let myself count yet.

I don’t know how many years I have. Nobody my age with two cancers gets a real number. I know it’s not infinite, and I’ve been living like it is. That’s the whole arithmetic. Small number of people. Unknown, shrinking amount of time. And a resistance in me that hasn’t moved an inch just from knowing the math.

I used to run companies on numbers like these. A shrinking runway, a hard deadline, a decision that couldn’t wait. I would have moved fast. I would have expected my team to move fast too. I don’t extend myself that same urgency here. I give myself an exemption I’d never give a business. I don’t have a good reason for that. I just know it’s true.

Where that leaves me

I still haven’t picked up the phone. I still haven’t written the list down on paper, where it would be harder to ignore. I know what I need to do. Knowing hasn’t been enough. It’s never been enough, not for this.

Maybe writing this down is the first real move, even if it isn’t the call itself. Maybe it isn’t. I honestly don’t know yet.

What I do know is that “later” keeps showing up in my head like it always has, roomy and forgiving. And I keep needing to remind myself that it isn’t. Not anymore. Maybe not for any of us, if we’re honest about it.

I haven’t made the list yet. But I’m closer to making it than I was before I sat down to write this. That’ll have to be enough for today.