Hindsight lays our hearts out to dry

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bluelotus

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“She made choices that she was responsible for, yet she had few safety nets to keep her from falling into oblivion,” he wrote. “I feel remorse for not rescuing my daughter. Hindsight lays our hearts out to dry. We cannot escape opportunities lost.”

This is part of an item of news on The Mercury News. I'm confused about the sentence Hindsight lays our hearts out to dry. What does it mean?
 
    • The last sentence explains the idea – hindsight (looking back over things you failed to do, or did wrong) is heart-breaking because you can’t go back and put them right.
     
    lingobingo said:
    The last sentence explains the idea – hindsight (looking back over things you failed to do, or did wrong) is heart-breaking because you can’t go back and put them right.
    Click to expand...
    Yes, I felt "lay our hearts out" meant "place our hearts out of where they used to belong" and your comment more or less proved that. Do you think that this is not so much a common usage as personal diction?
     
    Myridon said:
    "out to dry" is from this idiom:
    Definition of HANG OUT TO DRY
    Click to expand...
    I was told not to mess with fixed idioms before on the forum. I also saw an answer on stackexchange.com which stated that leave someone out to dry doesn't seem to be an acceptable variant of hang someone out to dry, according to Ngram Viewer. So I guess it's not a good choice to replace the hang in hang out to dry with some other verbs such as lay, though normal English speakers can grasp the meaning in this case. Are you in favor of my opinion?
     
    Non-native speakers should be very careful about messing with them because non-native speakers cannot judge what is too much of a change. This is not a case of that.
     
    This use of the phrase doesn't make much sense to me. My understanding is this:
    "to allow someone to be punished, criticised, or made to suffer in a way that is unfair, without trying to
    help them."
    hang someone out to dry

    How can hindsight do that to one's heart?
     
    Hindsight (understanding the mistakes you made in the past) makes you suffer but there's nothing you can do to change the past.
     
    Myridon said:
    Hindsight (understanding the mistakes you made in the past) makes you suffer but there's nothing you can do to change the past.
    Click to expand...
    That's very nice, but how do you get from "Hindsight hangs our hearts out to dry" to your version?
    I suspect the writer thought the idiom sounded nice, but was not aware of the meaning.
     
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