Don’t want to talk about dying? Better now than when it’s staring you in the face! When it does stand there—the one inevitability in human existence—what regrets will pain you most?
Here are the top five, according to a long-time listener to dying people:
(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.” (The author says “every male patient that I nursed” said that!
(3) “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” (How sad is that!)
(4) “I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.”
(5) “I wish I had let myself be happier.”
I’d give the author credit, if I knew his/her name, for being “spot on” as the Brits say. I’ve heard much of that for over half a century of pastoral ministry. I would add only this one: “I wish I had forgiven sooner and hadn’t carried so many grudges so long.”
The saddest fact of all is that too many of us (97.657%?) never give thought to what we’re going to regret in that setting! In discipling young men over the decades, I have encouraged them to thoughtfully consider the three things they want their pastor to say about them at their memorial service. (“Bill was known for his____,” etc.) And then to go and live in such a way that the pastor could do so. Honestly.
A friend who, for eleven years, directed a busy emergency room in a large hospital, gave me his observations gained in that often death-or-near-death setting. He said nobody ever talked about his new suit, or watch or ring, not a word about the world-class auto he’d just purchased, his golf-game, the last business deal he’d made, or the one he didn’t make! Nothing about politics or world championships. Not even about the big dust-up they’d had years before. It was always about good memories, affection, fellow-feeling, old times, sympathy, appreciation, hope, love.
Mitch Albom, in his “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” has a poignant passage in which he envisions Adam going to sleep for the first time and assuming he was dying. He awoke, Albom says, with something he’d never had before: a yesterday. Yesterdays may be far more meaningful than you and I have ever guessed. Wisdom would anticipate that possibility and make the most of them. Starting before the next yesterday arrives.