‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying’: What Matters in Life
A review of ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying’, by Bronnie Ware; Hay House, 2012.
One wonders whether a blog post like ‘Regrets of the Dying’, let alone the book it became, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, will be written in future. To its shame, the British House of Commons voted last week for assisted suicide (for it is a kind of suicide), and I hope the M.P.s who voted ‘for’ read the statement published by Disability Rights U.K., in which the group called the decision ‘a profound betrayal’, saying the law ‘risks pressuring Disabled people into decisions driven by fear, desperation, or lack of options’. The wisest of those who spoke out ‘against’, including the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, stressed that end-of-life care badly needed funding and help. To leave end-of-life care in such a sorry state, and then pass this bill after just six hours (a debate on fox hunting took seven) was troubling.
Bronnie Ware, who wrote The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, worked for many years as a palliative carer, that is, someone who takes 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.’ 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.
The book it 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 distills 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:
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.
Ware distills the essence of her patients’ reflections into five key regrets.
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 separate point—sought out and remained connected to others and sought balance. 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—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.
Ware writes in a straightforward, conversational way. Sometimes she is repetitive. This is a book that is too long: I often feel that most popular non-fiction books should just be Guardian long-reads or Aeon essays or, as in this case, ought to remain as blog posts. Sometimes the book is just a bit boring, as when Ware talks about her fledgling music career and attempts to pursue it while working as a nurse. But her stories of nursing are striking. She recounts her times spent with people who exemplified this or that regret — the woman, for instance, who missed her children’s youth because she worked all the time. And we see in these little accounts what a heavy burden so many of us carry and—more still—how pride, which manifests as a refusal to admit our mistakes or to be vulnerable, poisons everything, and can bring a decent person to such a point where only in their final moments of material existence can they admit they made an error.
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. That I cross-dress and have since I was six (and look fantastic: thanks for asking) is an important thing about me, but it is not the most important thing about me.
Unspoken emotion often leads to conflict and lasting pain.
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 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.’ I would add, from what, incidentally, is my favourite book, this passage by Pablo d’Ors. It is worth writing it out in full:
I am going to stop, I am going to think, to breathe, and to be born, if it is possible, for a second time. I am unwilling not to dance when the flute plays or not to eat when I am offered a delicacy. I will not store up for tomorrow when there are those who do not have today. Neither am I willing to believe myself to be the navel of the world, nor to assume that what is mine is best, nor to martyr myself with diminutive problems or imaginary pains. It is regrettable to have reached this point of unconsciousness, of stupidity, of insensitivity, this extreme of avarice, arrogance, and laziness. … The world is not a cake that I have to eat. The other is not an object for me to use.
This realisation, arrived at after many years of meditation, is that what gets in our way is our pride. Pride really does come before the fall, but that fall, most of the time, is not vertiginous: it is more of a slight slope that only grows steeper and steeper as time passes.
Humility, which is the opposite of pride, is not to think less of ourselves but to think of ourselves less, as Lewis put it. It may seem counter-intuitive, but when we are not thinking of ourselves we act naturally, that is, authentically. Ware is profoundly compassionate, but there is, I think, a small irony in presenting her discoveries in the form almost of a self-help book, which readers will undoubtedly take as a kind of reverse manual for life. What lies behind her words is an idea, an ancient ideas, that we should do our best get out of our heads, show reverence for life and be kind. Paradoxically, the most ‘selfish’ thing we can do, by which I mean, that which is in our self-interest, is to be selfless. Therein we find authenticity, balance, connection. But of course, that is easier said than done.
I would suggest you read the blog post, not the book, and if, reader, you are aching to discover more, then go ahead and read the book. It at least reminds us what matters, and nudges us to consider our priorities and make the changes we need to make without delay. 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.
