What Matters in Life: ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying’
- olivierbranford
- Dec 16, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 16
Bronnie Ware, who wrote 'The Top Five Regrets of the Dying', worked for many years as a palliative carer, taking care of the terminally ill. That makes her a very impressive person. And in the time she helped those nearing the end of their lives to die with grace and dignity she listened closely to the things they said. She was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives, a spell when, naturally, people reflect on what they did well, what they did poorly, what they wished they had done. People, Bronnie said, ‘grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality.’ Imminent death is transformative, but it's also a little late. She was so struck by the things her patients said that she wrote them down, in the form of a blog post to begin with. It gained eight million views, before being written as a book. So, what are the top five life regrets, as told by the dying?
Regret
The book that the blog became begins as an account of the time Ware spent as a nurse and blossoms into a meditation on life and how to live it well. For the clarity afforded by dying illuminates the mistakes of the living. In candid moments her patients confessed that there were things they wish they had done differently. Ware distils the essence of her patients’ reflections into five key regrets; but the book does not just document them: It asks us, young and old, to consider how we live now, the choices we make today, and to ask ourselves whether we are falling, or risk falling, into the same traps that so many others in the Western world have made.
Since you are, as it were, dying to know what these regrets are, I will put you out of your misery. Ware distils the essence of her patients’ reflections into five key regrets (click on the embedded links to read my articles on these topics):
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.
The thread that runs through these regrets is that, in our final moments, we come to realise that the secret to a good life is to be true to ourselves and - and I think these are more corollaries than a separate point - sought out and remained connected to others and sought balance in our lives. These are corollaries, I think, because a focus on work to the exclusion of all other things tends to be rooted in a struggle to be alone with ourselves, loneliness or a desire to seem impressive or admirable in the eyes of others, of our addiction to external validation - at any rate, tends to be rooted in inauthenticity. To be authentic is also to be vulnerable, and only by being vulnerable can we connect with others.
That ‘courage’ is mentioned twice is telling. For, as C.S. Lewis writes in 'The Screwtape Letters', courage is ‘not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality … A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.’ The phrasing of the final regret is also instructive: ‘I wish I had let myself be happier.’ That little word let conveys a great deal. It suggests that our happiness is not contingent on what lies outside of ourselves. We can choose to be happy: We can count our blessings, see what is good in every person and situation. We have a say. I call this imperturbable inner happiness joy: Joy is a choice.
Ware illuminates ironies in the way we live. We do not honestly express our feelings honestly, often fearing rejection; but create distance between ourselves and ourselves, and ourselves and others, in doing so. Unspoken emotion often leads to conflict and lasting pain. Moreover, it is bound up with the regret concerning not living true to ourselves. We do not necessarily know who we are, and emotional honesty can help us to get closer to crystallising that unfolding sense of Self. That patients tell Ware that they ‘didn’t know how’ to be themselves breaks the heart, reader, and yet it is surely very - perhaps even increasingly - common. And I say that because, despite all of our talk about diversity and freedom and so on, it seems to me that we are the subject of a flattening, a levelling-out, an attempt to homogenise or - worse - a reduction of individual complexity to some trait, often immutable.
Another thread that runs through Ware’s book is that it is not such a banality to say that life is short, and that we should not wait for the perfect kairos (right or critical) moment to arise. Yes, there are better and worse times to do certain things; but much of the time we use that to justify doing nothing. And all the while, the sand slips into the bottom of the hourglass. Per Marcus Aurelius: ‘Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.’
Death will come sooner than we think. What regrets might we have? What can we do now to prevent them? Act, says Ware, act - while you still can.
Namaste.
Olly
Dr Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD.
Fully qualified and certified coach
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