Death, Loss, Memory, and Regret

15 Apr, 2026

Many, many years ago, I attended conservatory and studied piano there. I was still in high school, and the abysmal system in Italy at the time required you to attend both regular school and conservatory at the same time. I won't dwell too much on the conditions I had to endure for 4 years (but I will mention that my piano teacher was an utter piece of shit, thank you very much), but I ended up quitting as I realized it had become unsustainable, and even dropped music altogether.

As you can imagine, since I work as a composer now, that didn't last forever. I still felt an urge inside, and while I might not be much of a pianist anymore, I still love music deeply and want to compose and play around until the end. It's a part of me I never want to part with. Still, a part of me died that day I quit, and left a void it took me quite some time to fill back in again. Possibly with music again, but in a different form.

Before conservatory, I had attended piano lessons with a private teacher for something like ten years, starting at age 5 after pestering my parents for "a long long time", according to them. She was responsible for making me fall in love with the instrument, and had a lot of patience with me even when I didn't study much and wanted to play things other than classical. She had some pretty severe arthritis on her hands, so she couldn't show me perfect technique nor play as well as she used to in her youth, but I really owe her a lot.
I went to conservatory not because I wanted a degree but because I wanted to improve myself, pushing through all the "you're gonna hate something you love" comments and truly embrace something that I felt was right for me. When I first told her, she was enthusiastic; she did a great job preparing me for the entrance exam too, because I passed it on the first try, and that's not very common with piano.

When I dropped out, I feared what she might say. But I didn't expect at all what she ended up telling me: "I'm sorry, maybe I should've been a better teacher to you..." That was impossible to bear. I don't even remember what I told her back, but I remember what I thought in that moment: "I'm going to become so good that, when I come back to you, you'll be so proud of me you'll see how good of a teacher you really were." I took almost a year off and then got back into music. I started composing more, moved out to study engineering (thinking "I might go into audio engineering through a different path..."¹), practiced on my own, avoided confrontation and just focused on getting better and keep on walking. I carried that weight on my shoulders, sure that it would've paid off.

I could never tell her those words, and those were the last ones I heard from her. She died a year and a half later due to medical malpractice for a routine surgery, and I only knew about it because my mom told me on the phone as a footnote. "Oh, remember your old piano teacher? She died.". Unable to ask more, because my aunt had passed away just a couple of days before and showing more care for my teacher than a relative felt like the wrong thing to do. So I bottled it up, and lost my chance to do anything about it. I don't know where she's buried, nor I know any contact info of her daughter, who I barely knew anyway. I simply had a burden I didn't know what I should've done with.

I had only one thought: I shouldn't have waited. I should've told her what I was thinking right in the moment, instead of waiting for the perfect one that didn't come fast enough. "I'm never going to wait again".
But I do wait and regret time and time again. I guess that's just annoyingly human, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating.
I think I might seem like someone who's always in a rush, especially when it concerns other people, but it's because I'm always painfully aware that nothing lasts forever and I want to live through it fully. If I die tomorrow, I want to be proud of what I've done until now. I want to leave something behind, even if it's not perfect yet, and I'm not sure I'll have enough time to make it perfect either, but it's at least possible to make it honest to the me in this moment of time. I want to cherish the people I love for as long as I can, even though it often feels like there won't be a next time. Precisely because I'm not sure if there will be a next time.
No one has enough time for everyone and everything, and there are always choices to be made. That acquaintance, maybe friend who I shared some interests and chatted with often at some point, who I thought "it'd be nice if we became closer friends" and then died before I could just do it. That cool girl on the Internet I was mutuals with and who I wanted to reach out to, collaborate on something, and then she killed herself before I mustered up the courage to say hi. Or even that time I brushed off when my mother wouldn't call me back in two days, busy with work, and ended up discovering through a series of frenzied phone calls that she was brought in the hospital for urgent care and my father and brother simply didn't tell me. Because they didn't want to bother me. She ended up fine, but since then I often think: what if she didn't? And what does that make of me, as someone who thought "I'll just call her later"?

It's not just actual death either. Relationships change and even die all the time. Places you've been to, you never know if you could come back, and even then they might be too different. Even the same unchanged flower field you played on as a five year old, the twenty-five years old you won't see it the same. Something that happens the same way twice can't possibly be the same for you, because it's happening to a different you who has experienced it before. There's this quote by Seneca that I've always loved ever since I was a teenager: "We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, and then our youth." As you can see, I didn't invent shit: Seneca was onto it much earlier than me.

So, what do you do with it? Do you wallow in regret? Do you hope to make the right choice every time, even though there is none? That's just awful. Experiencing death every waking moment of life should ease the burden, not to have it all felt in its entire weight at all times. Do you just accept it and go "it is what it is"? That doesn't sound right. The fact that there is no right choice doesn't mean that we should stop choosing altogether.

I've said it before: Art Doesn't Lie, and Art Doesn't Die. Ultimately, art is a memory. You can forget it, but its impact remains somewhere, maybe small, but it's real. Regret is human. It means that what was lost was important to you. Don't erase it. Make it live on in another form: grow as a person, write a poem, sing a song, go hug a friend. Don't keep on dwelling on the pain forever. The people you've lost, they keep on living through you. The places you'll never see again, they still have shaped you. Those you yet have to meet will be shaped by them as well through your words and actions, and you'll see them in a different light than the one you'd be without what you've gained before losing it all. Don't wait until it's over to truly understand how important something is to you. Be present. Reach out. Time moves on even when you're busy on other things, and when you come to it... it might still be too late. It's easier to forget and move on, but don't kill the memory of your past joys to avoid feeling more pain. Carry them with you.

This might be my longest post so far, and it's probably the most personal. Sometimes I go into second-person mode, but I'm just telling how I feel. Maybe it's easier if I tell it to the mirror.
We die every day, but some days take off bigger chunks of ourselves. Sometimes, something happens that makes you feel like you've died, and as everyone else goes on with their businesses... you realize you're not there anymore, and no one is mourning you. You come back as a different you. Some will notice. Most will not. It's no one's fault. Rebuild yourself and be true to your heart right now. Grow from the you you've been, mourn them if you need, but go on and carry them inside. Let kindness and care drive you forward, not drag you on the spot.

If you've read this far, thank you. You might forget it in a while, as we all do with a bunch of stuff, and it might've brought you to feel some kind of emotion: indifference, sadness, worry, anger, annoyance, probably something else I haven't thought about. That's a dent I put in your soul. Thank you for letting me in. Please do the best you think of this small piece of me.

#thoughts