Here is the full transcript of author Gregg Ward’s talk titled “Confessions of An Accidental Killer” at TEDxSanDiego 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
Introduction: Regrets We All Have
GREGG WARD: So there’s this very famous song, I’m sure you’re all familiar with it. It’s called “My Way” by Frank Sinatra. Now I love it, but there’s one line in that song that has always bothered me. It goes like this, “regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” Now hang on a second. I am pretty certain that Frank Sinatra had more than a few regrets, including hanging out with shady mafiosos and having at least one love child outside of wedlock that he never took care of. So there’s that.
But that song, and society in general, encourages us to minimize regret, as if they really don’t have an impact on our lives. But that’s just not true. For many of us, regrets are at the core of our identity and have a huge impact on our work, our relationships, and how we live our lives. I certainly have a few. Some aren’t very important. I regret eating a box of donuts right before my annual physical last year. Some are a little bit more serious. I regret not spending more time with my son after my divorce.
My Deepest Regret: Being an Accidental Killer
But I have one deep regret that goes right to the heart of what I’m talking about today. You see, I’m an accidental killer. When I was a young man, I was driving home late one night with my high school sweetheart, Michelle, and I was paying more attention to her than I was to my driving. And I went off the road, and I hit a telephone pole, and she died.
For decades after that, there were times where I was completely overwhelmed and brought to my knees by incredible guilt, paralyzing shame and sorrow and regret, a lot of self-loathing, not very much self-respect, and a desperate need to do whatever I could to pay back the life that I took.
And for many years, I thought I was the only one in this situation. I was wrong.
Every single year, 30,000 people in the U.S. accidentally kill someone. And many more are seriously injured or permanently disabled because someone made an unintentional mistake just like me. We all belong to a club that we never wanted to join. And recently, I found out that that club has a name. It’s called the Hyacinth Fellowship.
And last fall, I had the opportunity to attend their first annual in-person gathering in Detroit. All perfectly normal, reasonable, caring people from all walks of life coming together to try to figure out a way to move forward and to cope through their own accidental killings.
One woman I met there, let’s call her Marie, she was just one year out from having had a motorcyclist T-bone her car, dying instantly. And she told us that she had recently found out that two cars had collided in that exact same spot not long after her accident and both the drivers had died. And she said her very first thought was, “thank goodness they both died because then no one has to feel the guilt.” And we all nodded because we knew exactly how she felt.
And one of the realizations I took away with me from that gathering is how ill-equipped we are as a society to deal with regret. Now accidentally killing someone is very, very serious. But none of us are immune to regret. Maybe as I’ve been talking, some of you here have been thinking about something that happened in your life, some unintentional harm you caused someone that you truly regret that you wish you could take back and fix somehow.
How We Deal with Regret
The thing of it is, most of us don’t talk about our regrets until maybe we’re on our deathbed trying to own our mistakes and make amends. But by then it’s usually too late. Or if we do talk about them, we often get some really bad advice.
I remember one woman coming up to me at the funeral and saying, “don’t blame yourself. This isn’t your fault. God wanted her in heaven.” Now I know she was trying to make me feel better. And I know she truly believed that. But at that moment, all I could think was, are you kidding me?
But the really troubling piece of advice that I got over and over and over again was that I needed to forgive myself. Huh. Forgive myself. That is the last thing I want to do. You see, to me, forgiving myself is somehow making an excuse for my failure or deliberately letting myself off the hook so I could feel better about me. No, I was wholly responsible for what happened that night and I always will be. So forgiving myself is off the table.
But what I always needed to know was, how do I move forward in a positive way?
Moving Forward with Purpose
One thing I discovered is you can regret something and hold yourself accountable for it. But that doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself for the rest of your life. You could learn from your regrets. You could try to transform them or try to do something good with them.
You know, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got came from a friend of mine in the form of two questions, and he asked me this right after the accident. He said, “So, dude, this happened to you. What have you learned and what are you going to do about it?” Pretty harsh, right? Still, he had a point, but I was too overcome with sorrow and regret and shame to really think it through.
And that’s the thing about regrets. We can try to ignore them. We can try to dismiss them. We can even let them overwhelm us and undermine our relationships and our work for the rest of our lives. Or we can choose a different path forward to own our mistakes, to do whatever we can to help those we harmed and make amends any way we can and somehow try to make a positive difference in the world.
Finding Authentic Redemption
So the question then becomes how? Well, for many years, I tried to do good works in my work as a professional theater artist and in my writing and in my training programs on leadership and on respect. But looking back on it now, I think that all that good work I was doing was unconsciously disingenuous.
You see, as good as they were, those things I was doing, I think I was just doing them to make myself feel better about me and to convince other people that I’m a good guy, which I am. Just ask my three-month-old grandson.
Eventually, after doing some research on something called moral injury, which is where we intentionally or unintentionally break our own personal moral code, I realized that if I could make a powerful positive difference in the world in the way that Michelle would have if she had lived or would have told me to do if she could, then all the good I was doing would be wholly about her and not about assuaging my guilt.
So what I did was seven years ago, I started an art scholarship in her name at our high school. She wanted to be a professional artist, and it feels like that’s exactly what she would have wanted me to do. And you know what I regret now? It’s not coming to that realization sooner.
Don’t try to make the world better, to make yourself feel better about you. Change the world in the way that those you hurt would have done or would have told you to do if they could.
Conclusion: Using Regret for Good
The woman from the Hyacinth Fellowship I told you about, well, she is now actively researching practical ways to make our roadways safer for motorcyclists. Many in the group have become lay pastors and counselors and mentors to those who are still working their way through their own accidental killing.
Regrets? We all have a few, right? And that’s okay. You can’t change your past, but you can use it to correct the future.
