Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing

by Bronnie Ware

It may not have brought happiness, but learning to be kind to myself and give myself compassion above everything else was certainly a process I had to grow into. The healing had at least begun.

‘If I can tell you one thing about life, Bronnie, it’s this. Don’t create a life where you are going to regret working too hard. I didn’t know I was going to regret it until now, when I’m facing the very end. But deep in my heart, I knew I was working too hard. Not just for Margaret, but for me too. I would love to have not cared what others thought of me, as I do now. I wonder why we have to wait until we are dying to work things like this out.’ Shaking his head, he kept talking. ‘There is nothing wrong with loving your work and wanting to apply yourself to it, but there is so much more to life. Balance is what is important, maintaining balance.’

Looking across at me with a sad smile, he told me, ‘If I can leave any good in this world besides my family, I leave these words. Don’t work too hard. Try to maintain balance. Don’t make work your whole life.’

‘We must learn to express our feelings now,’ Jude emphasised. ‘Not when it is too late. None of us ever know when it will be too late. Tell people you love them. Tell them you appreciate them. If they can’t accept your honesty or react in a different way to how you hoped, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you have told them.’

She said that there was no need for guilt at all, if we have truly made our best efforts to express our feelings and to spend time with those we love. But we need to stop thinking that those we love will be around forever. Life is over in a flash, she reminded me. Jude was grateful she’d had time to say her own goodbyes, but emphasised that not everyone receives the blessing of time to express these feelings at the end. In fact millions don’t, as they depart suddenly and unexpectedly.

Sunday Morning Coming Down became my theme song. Having always loved Kris Kristofferson’s music and being quite influenced by him in my own writing, I found that song to be the best expression of my loneliness. Sundays were always the worst. Lucinda Williams wrote a good song about this too, singing: I can’t seem to make it through Sunday.

She was right. Every day in itself is a gift and a blessing. It is all we ever have anyway, the moment we are in. For the past twenty years I had kept a gratitude journal, where I wrote down a few things I was grateful for at the end of the day. Often there were lots of things to be grateful for. Occasionally, through the darkest times, I struggled to come up with any. I felt so emotionally exhausted at those times that even finding blessings was an effort, yet I always persisted. Even then I would manage to find things to be grateful for, like clean water, somewhere to sleep, food in my belly, a smile from a stranger, or a bird singing.

So if the learning never stopped, I wanted to embrace it rather than resist it. Every day brought something new to learn about myself, but I could do so with loving kindness; loving myself with no judgement. Laughing gently and lovingly also allowed the growth process to continue more smoothly.

Life is our own, not someone else’s. If we are not finding some element of happiness in what we have created and are doing nothing to improve on it, then the gift of every new day is wasted. A tiny step or small decisions are great starting points, as well as taking responsibility for our own happiness. A happy life can be found without moving house or doing anything drastic in our physical world. It is about changing our perception and being brave enough to honour some of our own desires too. No-one else can make us happy or unhappy, unless we allow him or her to.

None of the life reviews I witnessed from the side of deathbeds included the wish that they had bought or owned more, not even one. Instead, what most occupied the thoughts of dying people were how they lived their lives, what they did, and whether they had made a positive difference to those they left behind, whether that was family, community or whoever.

If you are already carrying guilt from things left unsaid to someone already dead, it is time to forgive yourself. You are not honouring your life by carrying guilt forward. Be gentle with yourself. That was who you were then. It does not need to be who you are now. Compassion for who you used to be, given from who you are now, is the first seed of kindness towards self-forgiveness.

History and understanding are what friendships offer. As my clients were looking back over their lives, it was often friends they missed—friends to reminisce with. Life gets busy and friendships fade away. There will always be people who come and go in life, friends included. But those who truly matter, those who we love most dearly, are worth every ounce of effort to stay in touch with. They are the ones who will be there when we most need them, just as we will be there for them. Sometimes it is not possible to physically be there, but phone contact gives people a lot of strength and comfort during hard times.

Friends bring humour to sad times, and happiness to the dying person. Whether we are dying or not, friends are the ones capable of making us laugh through the worst of times.

As Cath contemplated her final time, she spoke of missing a lot of potential happiness by focusing too much on the results, rather than the journey. It is easy to think that happiness depends on something falling into place, when it is the other way around. Things fall into place when happiness is already found.

While it may not be possible to be happy every day, learning to steer the mind towards that direction is. Acknowledging something beautiful outside of sadness helped me to move back towards a place of peace myself. The mind may cause great suffering, but it can also be used to create a beautiful life, once mastered and used properly. Every single one of us has reasons to feel sorry for ourselves. Every one of us has suffered. But life doesn’t owe us anything. We owe it to ourselves to make the most of our life and the time we have left, and to live in gratitude for that.

Kindness and forgiveness are great starting points. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. Forgiving yourself is absolutely necessary. Without it, you continue to add fertiliser to the existing bad seeds in your mind, by being hard on yourself, as I once did. Self-forgiveness and kindness weaken the strength of those seeds. Healthier ones replace them and grow stronger in time, overshadowing the old seeds until there is nothing left to sustain their growth.

Every single one of us is an amazing person, with a potential limited only by our own thinking. We are all amazing. When we consider the numerous environmental and genetic influences that have shaped us, including the genes that have come to us through our own unique biology, it makes each of us a pretty amazing and special person. All of our life experiences so far, both good and bad, contribute to us being unlike any other person on this planet. We are already special. We are already unique.

It is time to realise your own worth and to realise the worth of others. Lay your judgements down. Be kind on yourself and be kind to others. No-one has ever truly walked in another’s shoes, seen through another’s eyes, or felt through another’s heart, so no-one knows just how much another has suffered either. A little bit of empathy goes a long way.

Be who you are, find balance, speak honestly, value those you love, and allow yourself to be happy. If you do this, you will not only be honouring yourself, but all those who despaired in their final weeks for not having had the courage to do so. The choice is yours. Your life is your own. When challenges are thrown your way and you are wondering how on Earth it will all come together, how you will find peace about a particular relationship, when the contacts you need will arrive, or how you will find the money to make something happen, just remember that what your heart wants, you want too. You just have to get out of the way sometimes. Take what action you can and then let go. Stand tall, take a deep and loving breath and walk on, being proud of who you already are. Have full faith and confidence you deserve it, that your prayers have been heard and are already on their way to you. And simply remember one little phrase: Smile and Know. Just smile and know.