People over 70 don’t talk much about regret, but these 7 moments tend to surface when life finally slows down

There's a particular hour at the senior center where I volunteer when conversation shifts.

It happens around 3 PM, after the afternoon activities wind down and before families arrive for evening visits. The chatter about grandchildren and doctor appointments fades, and something else emerges. Stories surface that begin with "I wish I had..." or "If I could do it over..."

At 68, I'm still considered one of the younger volunteers, but I've been around long enough to recognize these patterns. People over 70 rarely lead with their regrets. They'll tell you about their grandchildren's achievements, their garden tomatoes, or the book club selection they just finished. But when life slows down, when the quiet moments stretch longer, certain memories have a way of floating to the surface like old photographs in water.

1. The family moments we traded for financial security

Last week, a woman in her eighties mentioned missing her daughter's piano recital thirty years ago because of overtime at the factory. Her voice caught just slightly. "We needed that holiday pay," she said, then quickly added how her daughter became a music teacher anyway.

This one hits close to home. I missed my son's college graduation because I couldn't afford the plane ticket. Teaching didn't pay much, and as a single mother, every dollar was already spoken for. He said he understood. He probably did. But understanding doesn't erase the empty space where I should have been in those celebration photos. Even now, when I see graduation posts on social media, I feel that familiar twist in my chest.

The cruel irony is that we skip these moments trying to provide for our families, only to discover that what they remember most isn't what we gave them, but when we weren't there.

2. The burden we placed on children who were still children

Have you ever watched a child trying to carry groceries that are clearly too heavy for them? That's what I see now when I think about my eldest son after the divorce. I made the mistake of leaning on him as "the man of the house" when he was just a boy. Fourteen years old, and I was asking him to help make decisions about bills and watching his younger siblings.

So many of us from that generation did this without thinking. We needed help, and our children stepped up, and we praised them for being mature. We didn't realize we were stealing something from them that they'd never get back. The freedom to be young, to make mistakes without consequence, to lean on adults instead of being leaned upon.

3. The apologies we never made to our adult children

In my previous post about rebuilding relationships, I touched on this briefly, but it bears repeating. The hardest conversations I've had weren't with my ex-husband or my mother. They were with my adult children, apologizing for the ways survival mode made me less present than I wanted to be.

Do you know how hard it is to look at your grown child and say, "I'm sorry I was so stressed during your teenage years that I missed seeing who you were becoming"? Or "I'm sorry I was so focused on keeping us afloat that I forgot to ask how you were doing"?

Yet these are the conversations I hear echoed in the break room at the senior center. Parents in their seventies and eighties wishing they'd found the words sooner, before relationships calcified into polite distance.

4. The friends we let drift away after major life changes

After my divorce, I lost touch with so many parent friends. It wasn't dramatic or intentional. Couples simply stopped inviting me to things. The dinner parties, the barbecues, even the book clubs somehow became "couple activities." I was suddenly a third wheel in a world built for pairs.

I hear this same story from widows and widowers all the time. They describe watching their social circles shrink just when they needed them most. One gentleman told me he hadn't realized how many of his friendships were actually his wife's friendships until after she passed. "I should have nurtured my own," he said, staring at his coffee.

5. The siblings we let pride keep us from

Virginia Woolf wrote, "For we think back through our mothers if we are women." But what about our sisters? Our brothers? These people who knew us before we knew ourselves?

A serious falling out with my sister lasted five years. Five years. Over something I can barely remember the details of now. What I do remember is the stubborn silence, each of us waiting for the other to break first. When we finally reconciled, those five years sat between us like a presence. We rebuilt, but we never got that time back.

I see this regret surface often in people over 70, especially when siblings begin passing away. The petty arguments that seemed so important, the inheritance disputes, the old jealousies, they all shrink in the face of mortality.

6. The dreams we labeled "impractical" and abandoned

A woman I know started painting at 74. She'd wanted to be an artist at twenty but was told that wasn't practical. So she became a nurse, raised four children, and painted exactly three pictures in fifty years. Now her apartment is full of canvases, and she says each one is a conversation with her younger self.

How many of us chose practical over passionate? How many dreams did we file away under "someday" until someday became "too late"? The regret isn't always about choosing responsibility, it's about believing those were our only two options.

7. The self-compassion we never learned to practice

This might be the deepest regret I encounter, though it's rarely named directly. It shows up in sentences like "I was so hard on myself" or "I never gave myself credit" or "I spent so much time feeling guilty."

We were raised by generations who believed self-criticism was the path to improvement. We internalized every mistake as a character flaw. We apologized for taking up space, for needing help, for being human. And now, in our seventies and eighties, we're finally learning what younger generations seem to know instinctively: that you can't hate yourself into becoming someone you love.

Final thoughts

These regrets don't define the people who carry them. The same woman who missed her daughter's recital also speaks of the twenty years of bedtime stories. The man who lost touch with friends also talks about the new connections he's made at the community garden.

Perhaps what strikes me most is how gentle these people are with others while being so hard on their younger selves. If we could offer our past selves the same compassion we extend to others, how different might our stories be? The answer, I'm learning, isn't to avoid regret entirely, but to let it teach us while we still have time to choose differently.