Regrets?

Bronnie Ware, a former palliative care nurse who worked with people during their last months of life, has written a blog post, Regrets of the Dying, and now a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. According to Ware her patients said:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I can honestly say I don’t have those regrets. (Especially #2 — I’m basically lazy, unless something grabs my attention.) As for Item #1, I haven’t completely neglected what other people wanted, especially when I was younger, but I managed to find plenty of ways to be true to myself, too. And the older I get the easier it becomes. Have you found that to be true, too?


 

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16 Responses to Regrets?

  1. Ursula says:

    Jean, poor poor Jean, here I am once more, the thorn in your comment box:

    WHY, Jean, don’t you regret any of the above? Can you honestly say you haven’t failed on at least one point?

    I most certainly wish I’d worked a lot harder. Question being: Harder at what. Second question: Why can you afford to be your often quoted “lazy”?

    Friends? Friends need to cherished. They are like siblings only more reliable. Can you honestly say you haven’t remembered a friend years down the line thinking: Shit, I wonder what’s happened to him/her? I myself still look for someone carelessly misplaced when we were in our late teens. I dare say he shot himself in the foot whilst felling trees in Canada. Apart from that one carelessness I water friends as if they were rooted in the desert. Not that desert plants need a lot of water. They just are. Lucky me.

    I will not go into “letting myself be happier”. That is psychobabble of the worst kind. You are happy or you are not – by nature, good fortune, luck. Determination doesn’t come into it. Luckily (for me) I am (relatively!) happy even when fate is pissing down on me. That doesn’t me that I am superior to those who just get washed away with it all. We have had this discussion/disagreement so many times I feel like hanging myself.

    “Expressing your feelings” – that, my dear Jean, and I mean it is the bug bear in our friendship: I do NOT feel that you expressing your feelings. You keep them under a tight lid. And it’s frustrating (for me). Though may you be happy with it. Though I doubt it.

    And then you mention living a life “true to yourself”. That’s what we do, Jean. By default. So I am pretty much upfront, you keep yourself to yourself. That’s not by expectation to anyone else – it’s how you and I ARE.

    Enough of this lather. Comp is going to crash any minute now before I had the most unfortunate chance of pressing “post comment’. Probably no such luch,

    Affectionately yours,
    U

  2. tammy j says:

    1. i don’t even have the courage to live it now! if i did i would get out of this horrendous climate that is literally dangerous for my health… and whose flat landlocked man made beauty does nothing for my soul.
    2. i did work hard. but it’s the only way i knew. it’s the jim reed work ethic.
    and if i were working today… i imagine i’d be working just as hard! LOL. some things are burned into your brain.
    3. yes. to my hateful and evil mother-in-law. when someone knows good and well what she’s saying is hurting you to your core… and even is lying about you… and smiles a strange very small odd smile… yes.
    i wish i’d had the courage to stand up for my feelings. i was too young.
    i thought i couldn’t. after all. she was a very beloved husband’s mother.
    nowadays… i would tell the woman EXACTLY what i thought and then leave.
    4. i have only just now made so many friends! we simply moved too much.
    i do wonder about many of them. but too many years have passed.
    i also find that friends came and went like the seasons in one’s life. not to mourn but to enjoy while there.
    5. well… i must have been an example of what ursula is talking about…
    because i was a happy baby according to my mother… and a happy child…
    and now i’m a happy adult. i don’t work at it. i just am.
    part of it i’m sure is being content with a small life. i never envy anyone…
    except maybe their cool summers and some rain! LOL

    this was a little like proust’s questionerre! always fun to think about.

    • Jean says:

      1. Unfortunately, there’s one compelling reason to stay where you are — the marine.

      2. I knew as a child I would go bonkers if I had to take a job that I wasn’t interested in. So I spent a lot of time and effort making sure I would have a choice. I don’t (at least didn’t) have any trouble getting involved in a project, but for me that’s not the same as work.

      3. The main thing is you are free to express yourself now. Yay, blogging! You were young then and have learned a lot since then.

      4. I’m with you! It’s not necessarily about clinging to past friends, it’s connecting with the ones in your life right now. My closest friends from the past have already died, for goodness sake!

      5. I was a happy baby but was depressed for a while when I was a pre- and early-teen. I decided I valued happiness and would figure out how to get back to it. As I recall one reason Martin Seligman became interested in Learned Optimism was because he wasn’t a naturally happy person and wanted to be more happy. And Abraham Lincoln, in spite of his tendency to melancholia, said, “People are about as happy as they want to be.” I also read a book entitled The Happy Person in the 1970’s. The author was a psychologist before his time. Instead of focusing on people’s problems, he wanted to know what made some people happy and others not. Basically the happy ones valued happiness.

  3. Evan says:

    Yes, true for me too.

    Most of my regrets are having said stupid things – usually well intentioned.

    • Jean says:

      Certainly there are things I would do differently if I had the chance to go back, but all we can do is learn from them and move forward.

  4. Cathy in NZ says:

    I go through phasaes and right now I’ve swiftly fallen into one with the demise of my eldest nephew, gone at the princely age of 57…

    indirectly when i thinking about life this morning, and sitting on the couch I was holding both hands together as if they were a book – and opened them up as if to read a papge AND REALISED the left hand was almost fully palm up – something my physio HOPED TO HAPPEN…

    so maybe the exercises are doing some GOOD after all

    possibly this isn’t an answer to the questions

    • Jean says:

      That is great news about your hand! Again, I’m so sorry about your nephew. That is the way I would like to go, though.

  5. Cindi says:

    well…
    I have a lot of regrets. So many that it’s impossible to be brief but…
    I ALMOST moved many times. But I didn’t. I almost moved to Florida, San Diego (twice), Milwaukee and Vermont…. I’m not sure if it’s a regret though, or just that sense of what could have been.
    The same with past love relationships and regrets on my choices for sure.

    But… I do feel like I’m slowly achieving #1. and being true to myself.
    #2. I’ve never had the luxury to not work hard.
    and like Tammy, I was raised that way anyway.
    So I guess I’d be working hard no matter what, but I’d prefer to be doing it for myself.
    #3. I find that in my “real” life, I’m able to express my feelings but no one cares. Really. I think I’m on mute.
    #4. There’s no one I miss from my past. I see the people I still want to see. Quality matters more than Quantity to me. And I now also have a wonderful group of friends that I have never actually met.
    #5. I think I’m happy but I could be a whole lot happier.
    Whoever said money can’t buy happiness, obviously never lived paycheck to paycheck. So I regret that I’m currently trapped in my current occupation because of my choices.

    Yeah… and I regret that I will never move now.
    I regret that I will never visit places I’d like to see.
    But to be honest, there are a lot of things in my life that I’ve done and choices that I’ve made, that I don’t regret at all.
    So, I guess I’m about even on it all.

    In the end, my only regret will be if I’m trapped in a bed somewhere, hooked to machines. That would be my greatest regret.
    I know that it can happen despite a person’s best efforts. But if I had a choice, any kind of chance… I’d rather Thelma and Louise it.
    Yep, a nursing home or hospital would be my biggest regret for sure.

    • Jean says:

      I’m sorry you are currently trapped in your job, and I hope you can start working more sane hours so you can spend more of your time on things you love. Your latest post does sound hopeful. We’re rooting for you!

    • Jean says:

      PS I agree with you about the end of our lives. I donate money to Compassion and Choices in the hopes it will help give me some say. Andy and I have written our Living Wills, and our doctor knows about them, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed!

      I still remember reading about a nurse saying she was so glad she was retired. She no longer had to torture old people.

  6. Rummuser says:

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

    Fortunately for me no one expected anything of me and so, I just drifted along.

    I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

    Work? I had never worked in my life. I just enjoyed doing whatever I was doing and continue to do that even now.

    I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

    Here, I would have to agree. By and large, I was / am able to, but there have been instances when I did not. I wish that I had had the courage to do so.

    I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

    I must say that those I wanted to stay in touch with, I did and so have no regrets. I have of course had bonuses as well in old contacts suddenly reappearing in my life to resume completely new relationships.

    I wish that I had let myself be happier.

    If I had let that happen, I would have croaked.

  7. nick says:

    I would definitely identify with 1, 3 and 5. 1 and 3 are not always possible when people expect you to behave in a certain way. And 5 is not always possible when you have worrying problems like someone’s serious illness. I’m impressed that none of the five apply to you.

    • Jean says:

      I’ve been interested in this subject for almost 60 years now, so I may have learned something along the way. Right now I don’t have to worry about a serious illness, but given our ages that could happen to either Andy or me, or both, sometime in the next 10 years. That’s why I’m appreciating what I have now, while I still have it.

    • Jean says:

      Of course, it may also be that the part of my brain that does the worrying has atrophied. That would work too.

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