When my mother died of cancer in 2023, the grief turned my mind into a speculative machine. For some time, I kept wondering about what choices we could have made differently for her care. I felt haunted by what was left unsaid and unfinished. Artists have always lamented this. Faced with mortality and in the search for meaning beyond our inevitable death, we wonder about the lives we didn’t choose, paths not taken, promises fumbled and left unfulfilled. The problem is we don’t get do-overs; life isn’t an orderly experiment we can run, comparing life A with life B. In his novel *Light Years*, James Salter understands this: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” What greater despair is there than to believe we are living our one life—and it might be the wrong one?…