Science of the Spirit

Top five regrets of the dying

Susie Steiner
The Guardian
Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:40 UTC

A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'.

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."

Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

What's your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?

Comment: Read Gabor Maté's When the Body Says No, for a thorough understanding on the societal and familial programming that prevents us from living authentic lives, and how we can learn to be true to ourselves and the people close to our hearts.

Reader Comments

gaurnitai74 · 2013-06-19T09:03:15Z

The wealthy who r Poor of Heart

Posted by Chaitanya Charan das • June 10, 2013

There are three gates leading to this hell — lust, anger and greed. Every sane man should give these up, for they lead to the degradation of the soul.

Money, money, money. That’s the supreme goal of life for many people today. We obviously need money to survive. But is it survival that drives most people towards money?

Not really. It’s happiness, the hope that money will enable them to live the kind of life that they have always longed for.

That longing will take a long time to fulfill. Rest of eternity, in fact.

Why will this hope never be realized?

Because it is based on the illusion created by the greed, the illusion that what we don’t have is what we need to become happy. No matter how much we get, as long as greed holds us in its grip, it will forcibly fix our vision to all that we don’t have. Greed makes the poor crave to be wealthy and the wealthy to be wealthier, the wealthier to be the wealthiest and the wealthiest to be the wealthiest in all of history… ad infinitum.

That’s how greed makes the wealthy into the moneyed poor. Their wealth may make a big difference in their social state, but it makes no difference in their mental state. In fact, the more greed is fed, the more its appetite increases. This make the wealthy crave all the more fiercely for more wealth, thereby escalating their dissatisfaction. No wonder the Bhagavad-gita (16.21) declares greed to be one of the gates of hell; the perpetual dissatisfaction induced by greed makes our inner world into a veritable hell.

What is the way out of the greed trap?

Inner enrichment.

By connecting ourselves with Krishna (or God or whatever is name of God in your religion) through devotional service, we can find lasting fulfillment. This enables us to be happy with what we have while also motivating us to do our best to do justice to our talents and share that fulfillment with others.

fortune · 2013-07-03T12:36:27Z

Re: The Wealthy Poor

gaurnital 74, beautifully written! Longing keeps us in the future -- Longing expresses dissatisfaction with the present. Both depress our fire and are nothing but more hot air on a hot day.

For years, my rule of the day is to live the day as if it is my last. It really is a blessing :))

jim24 · 2014-05-07T06:38:47Z

How

How do you live the day as if it's your last?? Do you yourself get up and go to work? Do you do nothing all day? Do you do volunteer work? Do you Party all day? How do you do it???????

klokman · 2018-08-06T15:20:24Z

jim24 There's only one way that I know of to do this: Live each day the best that you know how. Eliminate the fears of what others may think of you, and be your most authentic self. When the final day comes, reconciliation comes first with one self. A worthwhile life does not pivot on how others treated/mistreated you, but on how true you are to yourself. In the end, everyone wants redemption from their mistakes, but it only comes when you first are reconciled with your own limitations. If it could be expressed in a single word, it would be the development of empathy.

jollycodger · 2014-05-07T09:30:57Z

Love

Love yourself, love others, love creation, love God. Be grateful.

lydia · 2014-05-08T08:04:42Z

An old friend

told to me, some weeks before he died (he was 74) that the most important thing to be happy in this life and not regret anything when you die is not to be worried by money. This friend worked hard all his life and in his late years he was enjoying himself doing this: going to cafés to drink coffee with a book and meeting with friends and talking about books. I think he was happy before dying because he did what he liked the most. He was always enjoying giving flowers and books.

DavidStainberg · 2014-05-09T02:31:09Z

Personal experience

I faced a bad illness myself and i know some of the regrets that you might have. Since then i've changed. Believe me, people can hardly understand you when you are honest and frank about everything. It's also harder to be yourself instead of being what society wants you to be, but it is the only real and sensible way of living.
However, i just want to quote the movie "The Night Train to Lisbon" where they say "immortality is the most terrible think we can have". Steve Jobs also said that death is the biggest and most precious gift of life. If we have unlimited time, we will achieve nothing. We will always wait for a better time. Remembering that we will be death some day makes us live in the best way.

gdpetti · 2014-05-11T12:31:59Z

From the other side:

For hospice nurse, wife's death was one too many

May 10, 9:34 AM (ET)
By MATT SEDENSKY

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Everywhere Jay Westbrook turns, behind the wheel of his black pickup, a memory flashes.

In Van Nuys, it is the lifeless little girl he held at Valley Presbyterian Hospital after she was found in the bottom of a hot tub. Near Beverly Hills, it is the old woman in a seven-figure condo whose misery he tried to soothe. On Skid Row, it is the 29-year-old crack addict he brought morphine to numb the pain of cancer, as she died in a box on the street.

There have been thousands of them, thousands of souls he journeyed with to the intersection of living and dying, who helped establish him as one of the foremost experts on care in a patient's final days. Thousands of deaths that collectively formed his life.

It might have gone on this way forever. Then came one death too many.

---

The first time was a cluster of machines and tubes, and breaths shallow and panting. Westbrook was a student nurse, the patient a big man, swollen from cirrhosis. Westbrook had cared for the man for several weeks and when the time finally came, a profound sadness drove him to tears.

He felt powerless and mortal; and for the first time, this son of atheist parents felt something more.

"I had that experience of the place where life and death meet being filled with God," he said.

In the two decades that followed, Westbrook experienced more deaths than he could count — as a cancer nurse, in pain management and, most of all, in hospice.

He heard a little boy confess to his dying mother he once stole from her wallet, and a married Orthodox Jew acknowledge a long affair with a man. He saw athletes and movie stars, deaths surrounded by dozens and deaths all alone.

Each one was both singular and similar. Those who survived a brush with death reported traveling down a tunnel toward a bright light. Those whose age or disease brought a more gradual exit often experienced visions of a loved one who went before, as well as a day of seemingly stunning turnaround, where lucidity returned and pain subsided and all, for a short time, seemed well. It could be a cruel tease to those praying for a miracle, as it was generally followed by clues the end was near: mottled skin, cold extremities, and breathing that sounds like a locomotive leaving the station.

Through it all, he was sustained by love.

They met on June 7, 1968, at a party bidding Westbrook farewell before he was to leave California to teach reading in Appalachia. Two young women arrived dragging an unenthusiastic third.

"Nancy, this is Jay," the host said. "Jay, this is Nancy."

She wanted to take a walk on the beach, and Westbrook accompanied her. They took the footbridge over the Pacific Coast Highway, walking and talking for hours and coming to rest on the sand.

"Six hours later, the sun came up and we were in love," Westbrook said.

He never went to Appalachia. He was smitten. Before long, Nancy Morgan was Nancy Westbrook. They lived modestly but joyfully.

They couldn't have come from more different upbringings. She grew up in an Ozzie-and-Harriet family, surrounded by love and support, in Wichita, Kansas.

As Westbrook tells it, his own mother left when he was an infant, and when his father remarried two years later, he was placed in the care of family friends who abused him. His parents eventually reclaimed him, but he says he was still subjected to his stepmother's explosive anger and incest by his grandfather. He ultimately dropped out of high school and ran away. Later, addicted to drugs and alcohol, he spent time in prison, sinking so low he hatched a suicide plan.

He is 67 now, but the scars of childhood remain so deep he still sleeps with a nightlight to ward off a lasting fear of the dark. They helped stir in Westbrook a strain of empathy so strong he became irreplaceable at the worst moment in others' lives.

"My suffering," he said, "became my vehicle for awakening compassion in me."

He first put his soothing power to work as a veterinary technician, offering solace to owners when a pet was euthanized or a tough prognosis was delivered.

He then became a clinical gerontologist; in that role he constantly glimpsed death, and felt a nagging need to get closer.

A nursing degree brought him where he wanted to be. He became a luminary of the end-of-life world, not just because of his skill, but because he told the stories of his work with such eloquence it enthralled audiences, from medical students in a Harvard lecture hall to hospice workers filling a conference room.

Colleagues were in awe of his ability to say the right thing, manage patients' pain and forecast their remaining time with striking precision.

"All heart," said Mary Jo Leste, a nurse who once hired him. "He has a gift," said Carmen Febo, a hospice worker he mentored. "A pioneer," said Chris Downey, a doctor who attended a palliative program with him.

It was deeply fulfilling, but draining work. Nancy not only helped her husband deal with the depths of his past, but also the daily trials of death. Sometimes, when he arrived home from a tough day, he'd put his head on her chest and listen to her heart beat. They'd play with the dogs, talk about their days, discuss lessons learned from the dying.

Time and again, he saw a deathbed full of regrets. It taught him and Nancy to never part without an embrace and an expression of love. Tomorrow, he knew, was not guaranteed.

It was a Monday — Dec. 12, 2011 — when Nancy first awoke in pain. On Wednesday, she saw the doctor. On Thursday, she had a CT scan. On Monday, she had surgery. And on Tuesday, the diagnosis came: pancreatic cancer.

The doctors said she likely had four months to live with no intervention, up to a year with aggressive chemotherapy. Westbrook had had hundreds of pancreatic cancer patients before and expected she had seven months. Four days shy of that, she awoke feeling great, free from pain and full of energy — the cruel pre-death rally he'd seen so many times before. In the yard, she asked him to lift her up, and she put her head on his chest.

"I love you," she said, emphatically.

Before long, her skin became mottled, her extremities cold, her breathing strained. He knew the end was near and, though they didn't speak of it, he suspects she did, too. She wanted to stay outside in her beloved garden. And late into the night, they sat. She kept resisting going in to bed, but when they finally did, Nancy mustered her last words.

"I love you," she said again. "Goodnight."

By morning, she had lost consciousness. He took her in his arms.

"Sweetheart, I love you so much, I will miss you so much when you're gone, but I'll be OK," he said. "And if and when you're ready, you have my permission to go."

Ninety seconds later, it was over.

And now, Westbrook knew, his career was too.

---

Westbrook is behind the wheel of his Dodge, zooming south to the Hollywood Hills.

It has been nearly two years since he buried Nancy. He hasn't attended to another patient since.

He speaks of her in the present tense. He speaks of his career in the past.

"I've lost my life and I've lost my work," he said.

So many of his patients died with such certainty on where they were going next, but all these years of death brought him no closer to knowing whether he'll ever see Nancy again. He dreams of a blissful reunion. Even if it never happens and he carries this pain forever, he's grateful for what he once had.

"Small price to pay," he said, "for a lifetime love affair."

He has begun to counsel couples and advises on grief and pain relief. But he will not go to a dying patient's bedside.

He worries he would be more guarded, no longer giving his whole self to patients because he is immersed in grief. He wonders what it would be like to return home from a day filled with death and no longer have Nancy to turn to. He always saw his vulnerability as an asset; now he thinks it is a liability.

He drives and the memories surround him. He thinks of the young mother whose children watched in horror as she struggled with her final breaths. He thinks of an elderly man who, even as he died, could not forget the stillborn daughter his wife delivered 60 years before.

And he thinks of Nancy, the last ghost in a life filled with them. He smiles as he drives away.

=======================================
apnews.excite.com/article/20140510/one_death_too_many-abridged-05ef1611bc.html

klokman · 2018-08-06T15:58:34Z

#1 comes through in those I have known.

#2; I do not regret how much I worked. I regret not having enough time and energy to work hard AND play with loved ones and friends. I have too many interests, too much curiosity and adventure packed in me to do it all. The time allotted by Man's biology strictly limits how much can be accomplish before the organs give out. My bucket list consists of enough to fill up two more lifetimes.

#3; Most people do not even know how to express their feelings, especially women. We are not taught how to use feeling words which identify what it is we feel. Expressing them to others is a bottomless pit. Sometimes it helps others with understanding. Other times it merely overwhelms them. The most essential portion of feeling expression is in its identification, authenticating one's self.

#4; Over the years I have attempted to stay in touch or reconnect with friends of youth of by-gone days. I attended the 45th high school reunion a while back, and found that virtually all of my friends in school had not the slightest interest in reconnecting with me. If they conversed at all, it was about themselves, as though they were looking for redemption through self-justification. Two that I looked up have conceded to continue social intercourse. The one who writes periodically I had met and briefly got to know when I was 10. We had not communicated since then until a half-century later. The other claims I am his very best friend and thinks the world of me, but I seldom ever hear from him, nor did I for a half-century also, and the interchange is always egocentric to him. He is so immersed in his bucket list I shall never have the pleasure of his appearance at my doorstep, or a casual phone conversation. Friendship renewal is a fruitless endeavor, and usually an attempt to live a static life in the past. People move on. They slowly but inexorably change. But their basic personalities do not, and it is revealing to behold the stagnation of personality in so many souls once considered friends of youth.

#5; The most important message I ever heard came from Eric Hoffer, America's hobo philosopher, is that people are always running from themselves, looking for substitutes for that which is deficient within them. They search for them in mass movements, the ideologies of religion, politics, science. Everywhere but the building of those genuine aspects within of self-love. For all Eric's insight that he passed on to Man, for all his notoriety in his day, he is hardly known today. At the end of his simple, MGTOW life, he died virtually alone and friendless in a tiny apartment overlooking the Bay. But he considered that he had lived a good life because he was true to himself and never lost hope in his future.

"Odessa beckons"...

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Top five regrets of the dying

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