I had an experience some years ago which taught me something about the ways in which people make a bad situation worse by blaming themselves. One January, I had to conduct two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died "full of years," as the Bible would say; both yielded to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence   calls on the two families on the same afternoon.  At the first home, the son of the dead woman said to me, "If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It's my fault that she died." At the second home, the son of the other dead woman said, "If only I hadn't insisted on my mother's going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was more than she could take. It's my fault that she's dead."  When things don't turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Priests  know that any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course - keeping Mother at home, delaying the operation would have turned out better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse?  There seem to be two elements involved in our readiness to feel guilt. The first is our pressing need to believe that the world makes sense, that there is a cause for every effect and a reason for everything that happens. That leads us to find patterns and connections both where they really exist and where they exist only in our minds.  The second element is the concept that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault. The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile  myth of omnipotence  . A baby comes to think that the world exists to meet his needs, and that he makes everything happen in it. He wakes up in the morning and orders the rest of the world to its tasks. He cries, and someone comes to attend to him. When he is hungry, people feed him, and when he is wet, people change him. Very often, we do not completely outgrow that infantile concept that our wishes cause things to happen. What is said about the two dead elderly women?
They lived out a natural life. They died of exhaustion after the long plane ride. They weren't accustomed to the change in weather. They died due to lack of care by family members.