Suzy, as she so often is, was right. Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” is a stunningly concise work, concluding with a quote that has stayed with me for days:
The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been—which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.
For many of us, this idea—”the thing not done”—sums up a lifetime of lost opportunities and accumulated regrets. We often focus on the times we spoke rashly or acted carelessly, but Keegan flips the script, suggesting that the most grievous burden is not the trouble that follows a courageous choice, but the silent, lifelong shame of avoiding one.
The protagonist knows that confronting the future will bring difficulty, pain, or social backlash (“a world of trouble”). Yet, Keegan asserts that the true “worst that could have happened” is already in the past: the moral failure to act when conscience demanded it. It is the apology left unspoken, the intervention that should have happened, or the moment we chose silence over courage.
I can certainly count the times I have been offered a clear opportunity to turn a blind eye or walk away from a difficult truth, and my track record for taking the high road is not always good. These moments of avoidance carry a huge, compound cost. Keegan forces us to realize that the inaction itself—the void where a moral choice should have been made—is a punishment far heavier than any consequence of honest action. Her words serve as a vital reminder that the true test of character lies in what we do, not what we manage to escape.
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