Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who spent several years caring for patients during the last 12 weeks of their lives, routinely asked her patients about “any regrets they had or anything they would do differently.”
Bronnie spoke of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people would gain at the end of their lives and the common themes that surfaced again and again during these conversations.
Eventually, in a book about the experience, she would distinctly identify “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” They are:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so much.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
—
Funerals inspire me. They always have. There’s just something in the reminder of my mortality that compels me to make the most of each day.
I have attended several significant funerals particularly meaningful to me. I can remember the details and the stories well. No doubt, you can remember some yourself.
But perhaps the most inspirational funeral in my life is one I did not attend. It hasn’t happened yet.
Years ago, my grandfather, a pastor of 70+ years, called me into his office. I knew it well. He pastored the same church in South Dakota for 53 years and the items in his office always stayed the same: the large wooden desk, the typewriter, the bookshelves, even the drawer where he hid his candy. I stop in to visit every time I am in town.
But being specifically requested to meet him in his office on a designated day at a designated time was new. I didn’t know why he had invited me. And he wouldn’t tell me until I sat down across from him at his large wooden desk.
My grandfather started our conversation like this, “Joshua, I would like you to read at my funeral. Here is the verse I would like and this is where it will take place in the service.”
As he spoke, he slid a piece of paper across his desk. It was the order of service he had prepared for his funeral. Over our next several minutes together, he shared with me his hopes and desires for his funeral.
I suppose planning out one’s own funeral is not necessarily that rare. People do it all the time. My grandfather is in his 90’s and I am not surprised he would be thinking thoughtfully about that day—death is an inevitable occurrence for all of us.
What surprised me about the conversation was not the content or the subject. What surprised me was the confident nature by which he spoke. There was no fear in his demeanor. Death did not scare him. He did not regret, in any visible way, the coming end to his days.
And let me tell you, there are few things in life more inspirational than peering into the eyes of a man who does not fear his own death.
Years later, I still think about that conversation. Often times we hear about the regrets of the dying (as outlined in the list above) and we are warned to avoid making their mistakes.
But rarely are we offered the alternative.
Rarely are we provided with an example of a man or woman who faces death with few regrets. When we do, we are wise to follow their example and make the intentional adjustments that will prepare us to face our own mortality with courage and confidence.
As I consider the character of my grandfather’s life, I can identify numerous, reproducible actions to emulate:
1. Love well. My grandfather loves people with a rich love. He loves his kids, his extended family, his friends, even his enemies. His love for my grandmother is still so great he speaks freely of his desire to join her in death. This is not a surface love just for show, but one that includes his heart, his mind, and his soul. This is the type of love that allows us to reach the end of our lives with confidence and few regrets.
2. Hold lightly. My grandfather has always dreamed bigger dreams for his life than the offerings of this world. He has held everything this world offers with an open palm: money, possessions, fame, and prestige. He rarely pursued them out of selfish gain. They were given to him at times, but he was always quick to redirect the praise. Death always involves letting go of the world. And the sooner we learn how to do it, the sooner we prepare ourselves for that day.
3. Work hard. My grandfather is 95 years and still works 50+ hours/week. Nobody has shaped my view of work more than him. In a world that can’t wait for Friday and plans exhaustively for early retirement, my grandfather has stood steadfast in his appreciation for work and the fulfillment we receive from it. When we reach the end of our lives, we ought to be able to look back knowing we offered all our talents and energy to better the world around us—not that we foolishly wasted them.
4. Give freely. My grandfather is one of the most generous men I have ever met. Even while raising a family with four kids and struggling to make ends meet, he never turned his back on a legitimate request for assistance. From cash to food to housing, my grandfather gave and gives freely. He has given to me and he has given to strangers he will never meet again—all with joy and gratitude. Generosity in life provides opportunity to look back on our days with few regrets.
5. Make peace. My grandfather has made peace with others, peace with death, and peace with God. This is a blog read by millions of people from various faith and nonfaith backgrounds and finding peace with death means different things to different people. But my grandfather will credit making peace with God as the single most important decision he ever made in life. And believe me, nobody faces death confidently without making peace with it first.
Seneca once wrote, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. When it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. Life is long if you know how to use it.”
May each of us be inspired today to make the most of our one life and live it with no regrets.
Cheryl Moran says
This is a great article.
I was lucky and had a wonderful conversation with a great aunt. She was so calm and said to me “don’t be sad for me”. And the next day she passed.
krista O'Reilly-Davi-Digui says
This is beautiful. xo
Sandy says
An inspiring article. But the fact is we want to love free. However, our love for family compels us to obey their order and this lead to regret. I am a bit confused about what to do and what to not.
IPM says
What a great article Josh. I have unfortunately attended many funerals of friends and relatives over the past few years. As an atheist I have found the liberty of having no belief in God to be very liberating, and I have noticed that there is a growing trend in the UK to celebrate the life of the deceased at the funeral rather than appeal to the super natural.
I actually find this aspect more comforting than the worry I underwent as a small child when faced with worries over heaven or hell. The world will move on without us, as it has for more than 4 billion years but we will live on in the memories of friends and family and DNA of our children. This does not in any way subtract from Josh’s Grandfather. He seems to me to be the sort of person we should all strive to emulate.
Tori says
Trends are temporary, but ETERNAL life with PEACE is lived only through God. “Come unto me, all who are heavy laden and I will give you rest for your soul..” There is a void everyone feels, it’s a space created for God. Blessings
Beth.ww says
Thank you for these thoughts. Your writings have given me a sense of calm so many times because I sense the truth. I’m learning to fear less, trust God more, in Jesus’ precious name – Amen.
A heartfelt thank you to you, Joshua.
Naomi Brady says
Hi Joshua, I’m curious. Where does your grandfather pastor? I’m from South Dakota!
joshua becker says
He is in Aberdeen.
Benjamin Davis @ From cents to retirement says
Excellent article Joshua! Keep up with the awesome work!
AD says
It seems that these articles about old age and regrets are becoming more and more prevalent these days. My generation (40-50), in my opinion, have been questioning the values we grew up with during the 1980’s. Or rather the path we took in the 90’s and 2000’s. I find a lot of us speaking about retiring early and starting new lives. Our parents were by far harder and better workers who complained a lot less. They saw work as something that was a necessary burden and they accepted it. Now that they are old and are the generation that mine and others are taking care of, perspectives are changing. The younger generations are panicking and see the regrets as warnings to get their priorities in check. The problem is that hindsight is 20/20 and we can never tell what regrets we will have. On one had working less seems like a great plan, but tell that to the bill collector, that shiny new car loan, or that college tuition. We can draw an analogy with youth, as many of us recall how important friends, music, being popular or noticed was to us in our teens. It did not matter what our parents said, at the time it seemed so relevant. Now we see the folly. Point being we can hear all the warnings but at certain points in our life we feel different about so many things. Perspectives change, and mid-life is one of those watershed moments where we see the path divide and we feel that choosing to stay the course or make a complete life overhaul is a difficult choice. This is why I feel my generation is so conflicted. The next five years of our lives can be critical in determining what our life will look like in our golden years.
As for the main regrets listed I have a different view on friendship. Mine would be that I wish I cultivated different friendships and let go of those that did little to enhance my life. I feel I invested too much time and energy on frivolous friendships. Recently, I reviewed them and found that our best memories go back decades and less and less in the past 15 years. Old war stories that are now ghosts that we dredge up to make us laugh. Truth is the friendships never evolved and I found that the people who were so relevant in my 20’s did nothing for me in my 30’s and 40’s. I hung onto them rather that make new ones. I do realize some or most of the blame is mine as I always had a choice.
I read a story of an FBI agent who infiltrated the mob and various gangs. He described a interesting phenomenon. He is an highly educated and decorated veteran, He found that when he was under cover was surrounded by low-lifes with little or now sense or education, after a while his own vocabulary and mindset suffered, in other words he was becoming like them and even sounding like them. Years later he had to deprogram himself with books and being around educated and decent people. The moral of the story is that you start to reflect the company you keep.
My two cents is that a regret might be, I wish I made better friendships and let go of those that I felt were doing my mind harm. Sure it sounds egoistical and even mean but it is often for the best to distance yourself or cut off those people in the past. Just becasue you have friendships that are decades old does not mean they are worth keeping. Like bad habits they can hold you down. Only you can say for sure. You may also find that it is not the you or them but the basis of the friendship that is the issue. It may be based on competitiveness or an imagined kinship. Letting go can be the most rewarding things you do. Even though it was difficult I found I am more at peace now and I know that new friendships can be built on a better more mature foundation and not on the immature views of youth. The pressure of proving who has a better job or more money or better children is gone. This very fact proved to me that the friendships turned into something that made me fell guilty about how I was acting. So now I have far less friends and I am happier. I am deprogramming myself and feeling a lot better about life. I am actually feeling more energized and free. My old friends were by no means bad people or undeserving. The relationships just did not work for me, they did not enrich my life. People change and maybe you need to be the one do it.
Good Luck on your journey.
hashmo says
This is perhaps the best article I’ve ever read to encourage us to continue in our journey of minimalism so that we can strip out all the things that take up our valuable mental/physical time/energy/space/money. Minimalism allows us to then focus on what is really important in our lives by stripping out the unnecessary so that when we look back at the point of death we don’t have the regrets mentioned at the start of this article. Surely (regardless of your beliefs in an afterlife) those regrets are more worthy of being feared than of death itself.
It’s worthwhile before going to bed each night contemplating the possibility that you may not wake up in this world in the morning – doing so is a great motivator to change your life into one that you would consider a valuable one based on your chosen value system. For some of us we needed minimalism to find the space in our rat-race-groundhog-day lives to even figure out what that value system was in the first place.
Tim White says
This was so timely, Joshua. Thank you for sharing this. As I read about your grandfather’s love for his wife, I remembered how blessed I am to still have my wife living with me. Someday, we may have to leave this world without the other. I hope that we can say then that we loved each other well and that we didn’t waste the time that we had. I know that I could do better. God, help me to make the most of the time that I have with those that you have put in my life — especially my precious wife.