It has been a little over two and a half months since I lost my mother. Even now, writing that sentence feels unnatural.

There are events that the mind can understand intellectually long before the heart develops any language for them. Death is perhaps the most brutal example.

I know what happened. I know the date. I know the diagnosis. I know the treatments. I know the sequence of events that brought us from an ordinary life into hospitals, scans, medicines, consultations, hope, deterioration, and finally an absence that cannot be reversed.

And yet knowing the history does not prevent the mind from returning to it.

Again.

And again.

Grief has its own strange dynamics. It does not merely remember the past. It reconstructs it. It searches. It asks questions.

What if I had acted differently?

What if I had insisted earlier?

What if I had understood sooner?

What if I had known then what I know today?

And finally, beneath all of those questions, another one began to appear.

A much more dangerous one.

\textbf{Was it my fault?}

For months, that question remained inside me like an unresolved equation.

Sometimes quietly. Sometimes violently. Sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes while studying. Sometimes during an ordinary meal. Sometimes when nothing in particular had happened at all.

Grief has a peculiar ability to convert uncertainty into accusation.

A possibility slowly begins to feel like a probability. A probability becomes a conclusion. And eventually the conclusion begins to feel like a fact.

Without realising it, I had constructed a causal model inside my own mind:

\textbf{My decision} \longrightarrow \textbf{Delay} \longrightarrow \textbf{Disease progression} \longrightarrow \textbf{Her death}

It looked clean. Linear. Almost mathematical.

And perhaps that was precisely the problem.

It was too simple to describe reality.

Grief had reduced an entire universe of interacting causes into a single variable: ‘me’.

Where the Story Began

The story goes back to 2023.

At that time, I was in the United Kingdom completing my postgraduate studies in physics. My mother had developed a persistent ulcer on her tongue. When she consulted an ENT specialist, the doctor recommended a biopsy.

The word frightened her.

It frightened me too.

I was thousands of kilometres away, immersed in my degree, already carrying academic and immigration-related pressures of my own. But none of that frightened me as much as one possibility:

What if my mother had cancer?

My mind refused to accept it.

Cancer?

My mother?

No.

It had to be something else.

An infection.

An ulcer.

Something treatable.

Something temporary.

Something that would eventually disappear and allow life to return to normal.

At the same time, I encountered a belief that I now know was medical misinformation: that performing a biopsy could somehow cause cancer, trigger cancer, or make an existing lesion malignant.

Today, I know better. At that time, I did not.

My mother herself was frightened of the procedure. There were concerns regarding where the biopsy would be performed. There were questions of trust in the hospital. There were financial disagreements. There were family decisions. There was uncertainty everywhere.

And then there was me.

I reassured my mother. I told her that it might not be cancer. I told her that perhaps the biopsy was unnecessary. I told her that everything would be fine. And I believed what I desperately wanted to believe.

The biopsy did not happen then.

Life Did Not Pause While We Were Afraid

When I returned to India in January 2024, I did not return to a stable life.

Almost immediately, my family had to relocate from the house where we had been living.

Weeks disappeared into searching for another place.

Then another problem appeared.

My education-loan moratorium was approaching its end.

I did not yet have stable employment.

Monthly repayments were coming.

The world, as it often does, continued demanding practical answers while something much deeper was quietly deteriorating in the background.

So I searched for jobs.

I moved. I worked. I changed jobs. I tried to stabilise my finances.

Meanwhile, my mother’s condition continued to worsen.

She became thinner. Her pain increased. Symptoms accumulated.

Today I understand words such as $\textbf{cachexia}$ and $\textbf{disease progression}$ differently.

At the time, I did not.

I was observing pieces of a system without understanding the system itself.

Eventually, the situation became impossible to ignore.

In December 2024, the biopsy was finally performed.

The diagnosis came.

Cancer.

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

By the time the disease was eventually treated at a major cancer centre, it had progressed to an extremely advanced stage.

And from that point onward, my life changed completely.

Then I Fought

Once the reality became undeniable, denial disappeared.

I began learning oncology. I read medical papers. I questioned doctors. I tried to understand surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy, imaging, staging, progression, biomarkers, treatment response, resistance, and every possible pathway that might offer my mother another chance. I participated in consultations. I searched for alternatives. I argued when I thought something needed to be reconsidered. I learned medicine not because I had ever intended to, but because suddenly the person I loved most depended upon decisions being made inside a world I barely understood. I fought with an intensity I had never previously discovered within myself.

Doctors noticed it. They encouraged me. They acknowledged and appreciated my active involvement.

But eventually I encountered one of the hardest truths a human being can ever learn:

\boxed{\textbf{Effort does not guarantee outcome.}}

I fought. The doctors fought. My mother fought. And still, I lost her.

That was when the guilt truly began.

Because once the battle ended, my mind suddenly had nowhere left to go.

There was no ‘next’ treatment to research. No ‘next’ scan to interpret. No ‘next’ specialist to consult. No ‘next’ option to find.

For months my mind had been trained to ask:

\textbf{What can I do next?}

Death removed the word ‘next’.

And so my mind travelled backward instead.

If I could no longer save her in the future, perhaps I could save her in the past.

At least mentally.

That was how the counterfactual began.

The Single-Variable Error

I began replaying one question obsessively:

\textbf{What if I had insisted on the biopsy earlier?}

Without realising it, I had constructed the following model:

Y=F(x_1)

where

Y=\text{the final outcome}

and

x_1=\text{my decisions}

If this model were correct, then the conclusion would appear almost inevitable.

Change $x_1$ , and I change Y.

In other words,

x_1′ \Rightarrow Y’

And somewhere inside my grief, that evolved into an even stronger assumption:

Y’=\text{my mother survives}

That was the equation torturing me.

But one morning, something suddenly became obvious.

The mathematics itself was wrong.

Not because equations cannot describe such problems.

But because I had chosen the wrong model.

I Was Never the Universal Set

An event of this complexity is not generally the result of one variable.

A more realistic representation would be

Y=F(x_1,x_2,x_3,\ldots,x_n)

Let the entire causal configuration of the situation at time $t$ be represented by

U(t)={x_1(t),x_2(t),x_3(t),\ldots,x_n(t)}

For months, I had unconsciously treated myself as though

x_1=U

As though I were the entire universal set.

As though the entire history depended upon my decision alone.

But I was not the universal set.

I was an element within it:

x_1\in U

Perhaps an important element.

Perhaps an influential one.

But still only one part of the system.

Other variables included, among many others,

x_2=\text{tumour biology}

x_3=\text{disease stage at different times}

x_4=\text{my mother’s decisions and fears}

x_5=\text{other family decisions}

x_6=\text{financial circumstances}

x_7=\text{healthcare access}

x_8=\text{trust in available medical institutions}

x_9=\text{medical information available to us}

x_{10}=\text{treatment response}

together with countless additional variables, interactions, constraints, and biological processes.

Some were visible. Some were measurable. Some were hidden from me. Some belonged to other people. Some could only be recognised in hindsight. And some may never have been knowable at all.

The true causal structure was therefore not

x_1\longrightarrow Y

but something closer to

(x_1,x_2,\ldots,x_n)\longrightarrow Y

That distinction changed something inside me.

I had mistaken being part of the cause for being the cause of everything.

Influence Is Not Control

Recognising that I was only one variable does not mean that my decisions were irrelevant.

That would be another oversimplification.

Changing $x_1$ can certainly alter the trajectory of a system.

A single variable may be important.

It may even be decisive under certain circumstances.

But there is an enormous conceptual difference between $\textbf{influence}$ and $\textbf{control}$

I had influence. I did not have arbitrary control over $U(t)$ .

I was not standing outside the system selecting every initial condition and boundary condition. I was inside it.

I did not control tumour genetics. I did not control the biological aggressiveness of the disease. I did not control the actions of every other person. I did not control financial limitations. I did not control the medical information that reached me. I did not control the knowledge that I had not yet acquired. I did not control how the disease would respond to eventual treatment. And perhaps most importantly, I did not possess a complete description of the system.

My real condition was therefore closer to

\boxed{\text{partial information}+\text{partial control}}

than to

\boxed{\text{complete information}+\text{complete control}}

This led me to an extraordinarily important distinction:

\boxed{\text{Influence}\neq\text{Total Control}}

and consequently,

\boxed{\text{Influence}\neq\text{Total Responsibility}}

That was the first relationship that genuinely began to loosen the grip of guilt.

The Counterfactual Timeline

Then came the most difficult thought experiment.

Suppose time travel were possible. Suppose I could return to 2023 carrying everything I know today. Suppose that instead of reassuring my mother that the biopsy might not be necessary, I said:

\textbf{No. We must do this immediately.}

Mathematically, that would represent an intervention:

x_1(t_0)\rightarrow x_1′(t_0)

That change would create a different trajectory:

U(t)\rightarrow U'(t)

And possibly a different final state:

Y\rightarrow Y’

But there is a fundamental problem.

I cannot observe $U'(t)$ .

That timeline did not occur.

The only trajectory available to me is

U(t)\rightarrow Y

The alternate trajectory remains counterfactual.

Therefore I cannot establish either of the following claims:

\textbf{“If I had acted differently, she definitely would have survived.”}

\text{or}

\textbf{“If I had acted differently, exactly the same outcome would have occurred.”}

Both statements claim certainty about an unobserved history.

The most intellectually honest statement is therefore:

\boxed{\textbf{The trajectory might have changed; the final counterfactual outcome is unknowable.}}

The word ‘might‘ became extremely important to me.

Grief had quietly replaced it with ‘would’.

There is an enormous logical difference between

Things might have been different.

and

She would definitely be alive if I had acted differently.

The first acknowledges uncertainty. The second invents certainty where none exists.

The Hidden Variables of Human Life

At first I loosely compared this realisation with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

But the comparison needs care.

The quantum-mechanical uncertainty relation,

\Delta x\Delta p\geq\frac{\hbar}{2}

has a very specific physical meaning associated with non-commuting observables.

My situation was not a literal example of quantum uncertainty.

What I was confronting was something broader:

\textbf{Epistemic limitation inside a complex causal system.}

Human situations contain variables we know. Variables we partially understand. Variables we cannot measure. Variables governed by other agents. Variables whose importance becomes visible only afterward. And variables whose existence we may not even recognise until the system has already evolved.

My decision was one coordinate inside an extraordinarily high-dimensional state space.

Psychologically, I had compressed that state space into one dimension.

That was the mistake.

Hindsight Changes the Information State

There was another error hiding inside my guilt.

Today I know considerably more medicine than I knew in 2023.

I know that a biopsy does not create cancer. I understand progression differently. I understand staging differently. I understand treatment differently. I understand danger differently.

Because this knowledge exists inside my present mind, it becomes incredibly easy to imagine that my past self somehow ought to have possessed it as well.

But these are different information states.

Let $I(t)$ represent the information available to me at time $t$ .

Then clearly,

I_{\text{now}}\neq I_{\text{then}}

The person making decisions in 2023 did not possess

I_{\text{2026}}

My past decision was instead produced by something more like

G\bigl( I(t), R(t), E(t), P(t), \ldots \bigr)

where

I(t)=\text{information}

R(t)=\text{available resources}

E(t)=\text{external circumstances}

and

P(t)=\text{psychological state}

Fear mattered. Distance mattered. Misinformation mattered. Resources mattered. Family dynamics mattered. The information available at that moment mattered.

By judging my previous action using knowledge acquired much later, I was effectively doing something mathematically strange:

I was inserting future information into past initial conditions, then condemning the earlier system for failing to evolve as though that information had always been present.

That is hindsight bias expressed almost like an equation.

My past self cannot be judged as though he secretly possessed my present knowledge.

Regret Is Not the Same as Guilt

This distinction eventually allowed me to say something I had previously thought impossible.

I can regret a decision without accepting responsibility for the entire outcome.

I can truthfully say:

\textbf{I wish I had encouraged the biopsy earlier.}

I can also say:

\textbf{Knowing what I know today, I would act differently.}

Both statements can be true.

But neither logically implies:

\textbf{Therefore I caused my mother’s death.}

The inference does not follow.

There is a categorical difference between $\textbf{regret}$ and $\textbf{complete causal responsibility}$

Inside grief, those two concepts had become fused.

Mathematics helped me separate them.

The Equation That Helped Me Breathe Again

Eventually, everything reduced to a structure simple enough for me to carry:

\boxed{ \begin{align} &\textbf{I was an element of the causal system, not the entire system.}\\[4pt] &\textbf{I had influence, not total control.}\\[4pt] &\textbf{I acted under incomplete information.}\\[4pt] &\textbf{Changing my action might have changed the trajectory.}\\[4pt] &\textbf{The alternative final outcome cannot be observed.}\\[4pt] &\therefore\ \textbf{I cannot assign the entire observed outcome to myself.} \end{align}}

Or, in its shortest form,

\boxed{\textbf{Influence}\neq\textbf{Control}\neq\textbf{Total Responsibility}.}

To somebody else, these may simply look like equations.

To me, they became an exit from a psychological prison.

Mathematics Did Not Remove My Grief

My mother is still gone. No equation changes that. No philosophical argument reverses it. No causal model gives me back the person I want most.

I still miss her. I still wish things had happened differently.

There are still moments when I would give almost anything to return to an earlier point in time and change the course of events.

Mathematics did not solve grief. It did something more modest—and perhaps more important.

It stopped grief from making a claim that the evidence did not support.

It helped me distinguish between

\textbf{“I wish things had been different”}

\text{and}

\textbf{“Everything happened because of me.”}

The first is grief. The second was an incorrect causal model.

That distinction did not bring my mother back. But it helped bring part of me back.

Perhaps This Is One of the Gifts of Science

I have spent much of my life studying physics.

When we think about mathematics and physics, we usually imagine black holes, quantum mechanics, cosmology, spacetime, fields, differential equations, and the early universe.

I never imagined that one day the same way of thinking would help me confront something as intimate as guilt.

Yet perhaps mathematics is more human than we sometimes realise.

Mathematics does not ask whether the system is a galaxy, an atom, a fluid, an economy, a population, or a chain of human decisions.

It asks:

What are the variables? What is known? What is unknown? What is assumed? What can be controlled? What cannot? What causal model are we using? And does the conclusion actually follow from the premises?

Sometimes those questions are useful even when the system under investigation is ourselves.

Science did not make me less emotional. It gave my emotions another language in which they could be examined.

For Someone Else Carrying Guilt

If somebody reading this is carrying guilt over something irreversible, I would hesitate to say simply:

\textbf{Stop blaming yourself.}

A grieving mind may immediately respond:

\textbf{Why shouldn’t I?}

Instead, I would ask something different:

What exactly was within your control? What information did you genuinely possess at that moment? How many other variables were involved? Which decisions belonged to other people? Which constraints were biological, financial, environmental, social, psychological, or simply unknowable? Are you treating yourself as though you were the entire causal system? And are you claiming certainty about an alternative timeline that nobody can observe?

Perhaps write the problem down.

Define

U={x_1,x_2,\ldots,x_n}

Put yourself somewhere inside it.

Suppose you are $x_1$ , then ask $x_1=U$ ?

Were you truly the entire system?

Almost certainly not.

You may have mattered enormously. You may have influenced events. You may even have made mistakes.

But an influential variable is not automatically the author of the entire trajectory.

Responsibility Without Self-Destruction

There is another important lesson here.

This framework should not become an excuse to deny responsibility. That would miss the point completely.

If I made a mistake, I should learn from it. If I believed misinformation, I should become more careful about evidence. If fear influenced my judgement, I should recognise what fear can do. If I encounter a serious medical situation again, I should act earlier, seek qualified advice, and verify claims instead of relying upon comforting assumptions.

Learning is responsibility. Self-destruction is not.

There is a profound difference between saying

\textbf{“I want to become wiser because of what happened”}

and saying

\textbf{“I must punish myself forever because of what happened.”}

The first can improve a life. The second merely destroys another one.

Being Human Inside a Complex Universe

There is something humbling in all of this.

We are finite systems embedded inside systems vastly larger than ourselves.

We never possess every variable. We never know every interaction. We never control all initial conditions. And nevertheless, we must make decisions.

Perhaps this is one of the fundamental conditions of being human:

\boxed{\textbf{We must act despite incomplete knowledge.}}

Maturity may therefore not mean achieving perfect control. Perhaps it means learning to act intelligently despite uncertainty. Taking responsibility for what genuinely belongs to us. Learning from mistakes. Correcting bad models. And refusing to assign ourselves ownership over variables we never possessed.

I cannot rewrite my past. But I can decide what I carry forward from it.

I can become more careful with evidence. I can question misinformation. I can act when action is required. I can recognise when fear is distorting judgement. I can understand that love does not create omniscience. And I can stop demanding that my past self should somehow have known everything my present self learned only after surviving the consequences.

A Universe of Variables

There is perhaps something larger hidden inside this experience.

The universe itself is a system of extraordinary complexity.

Every event emerges from interactions. Every observable state has a history. Every history depends upon conditions extending far beyond the small region any single observer can access. And we humans exist inside that system, not outside it.

We are not external operators controlling reality from some privileged vantage point. We are participants. Elements. Subsystems. Finite agents attempting to understand a universe whose total state vastly exceeds our own knowledge.

And yet within those limitations, something extraordinary happens.

We learn. We model. We question. We correct ourselves. We create meaning. We care.

Perhaps that is one of the strangest gifts of consciousness:

A tiny element inside the universal set can nevertheless attempt to understand the set that contains it.

What I Finally Understand

For a long time, I believed that if I could identify one decision I had made incorrectly, then perhaps I had discovered the cause of everything that followed.

Now I understand that reality is rarely that simple.

An outcome can be written schematically as

Y=F(x_1,x_2,\ldots,x_n)

I was one of those variables. Not all of them.

I was part of the system. Not the system itself.

I had causal influence. I did not have universal control.

And perhaps this is the equation I will carry for the rest of my life:

\boxed{ \textbf{I influenced the trajectory.} \quad \textbf{I did not control the universe in which that trajectory unfolded.} }

I still love my mother. I still miss her in ways I cannot explain. I still wish I could change the past.

But I no longer believe that loving her requires me to hold myself responsible for every variable I could never control.

Sometimes healing does not begin when the pain disappears. Sometimes it begins when the model becomes more accurate.

And in my case, strangely, beautifully, unexpectedly—

\textbf{Mathematics helped me find that accuracy.}

Tag: Counterfactual Thinking

The Mathematics of Guilt: What Grief Taught Me About Causality, Control, and Forgiveness