I Wish I Was, I Wish I Were

I'm implementing the edits to Grief: The Great Yearning my last couple of readers suggested, and I was doing fine until I hit this passage:

I'm trying to find comfort in knowing he is no longer suffering, and for a moment yesterday I even envied him. I wish my pain were over, too.

Both readers said "were" should be "was." Since they are readers, not editors or grammarians, I ignored the suggestion, especially since MS Word grammar check agrees with me. Still, something niggled at me, so I spent an hour online reading various articles comparing I wish it were vs. I wish it was. And this is what I found:

Were is used if what is wished for is impossible, Such as I wish the sky were pink with green polka dots.

Was is used if what is wished for is possible, such as I wish the sky was blue.

The first sentence connotes a futile longing for the fantastic, the second connotes hope for a future day when the sky will be again be blue.

Another pair of examples:

I wish I were home again, sitting on the veranda, drinking sweet tea with my mama.

I wish I was home again, sitting on the veranda, drinking sweet tea with my mama.

Using were in the first sentence conjures up futility; I can never go home again, perhaps because the house burned down or my mama died. Using was in the second sentence conjures nostalgia and looking forward to going home and seeing my mama again. All that from a simple switch of verbs! Such is the beauty of our nuanced language.

So, how does this translate to my editing problem? I changed were to was. When I wrote the sentence twenty-one months ago, I deliberately used were. I thought it impossible that the pain of those early days would ever diminish. And yet, though I still have bouts of pain at his being dead, I don't feel the total and constant agony I felt in the beginning. So was is the better choice. It connotes hope rather than futility.

So, I'm trying to find comfort in knowing he is no longer suffering, and for a moment yesterday I even envied him. I wish my pain was over, too.

Someday, perhaps, it will be.

Tagged: grammar, I wish I was vs. I wish I were, I wish it were vs. I wish it was, language, nuances of language, were vs. was