Imagining yourself on your deathbed probably won’t fill you with much enthusiasm. Me neither. But please bear with me, because here’s an exercise that might just help you to live a fulfilled and regret-free life.
The days before death are a time for reflection. It’s often only then that people truly contemplate their lives and what they’ve achieved. Almost inevitably, because we’re all human, there are regrets.
Australian nurse Bronnie Ware spent several years working in palliative care. Struck by the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gained as the end approached, she decided to record her experiences.
Top five regrets
The result was her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. In descending order of importance, these were the five most common regrets that patients expressed:
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.
“Choose happiness”
What came across most strongly, the author recalls, was how many of the patients she listened to wished they’d had more self-awareness, and a better grasp of their own personal values, much earlier in their lives.
“When you are on your deathbed,” she says, “what others think of you is a long way from your mind… Life is a choice. It is your life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.”
Personal relationships
A few years later, Kerry Egan, an American hospice chaplain, embarked on a similar exercise. She too recorded what terminally ill patients said to her and wrote a book called On Living: Life’s greatest lessons and last thoughts from the dying.
There are clear similarities between the two authors’ experiences. Both of them found that the biggest regrets surrounded personal relationships.
“Talking with people at the end of life has made me realise how important family relationships are,” Egan says. “One of the more common regrets is that people wish they had shown each other love more. Often people deeply loved their family members, but never said it or showed it, and they wish they had."
What about financial regrets? "If money played any part in regrets,” she says, "it’s only that some people worried about leaving their spouse or children without enough money to live on once they were gone. No one ever regrets not wearing that £5,000 dress or never owning that Lexus.”
Money and happiness
There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to be wealthy or indeed famous. The important point to remember is that the things we think will make us happy can often disappoint us and leave us feeling empty.
Take the industrialist J. Paul Getty, for example. In 1966 he was named by the Guinness Book of Records as the world's richest private citizen. But, by his own admission, his private life was a disaster. He said he would gladly give all his millions for lasting domestic happiness.
“I have never been given to envy,” he wrote in his autobiography, “save for the envy I feel toward those people who have the ability to make a marriage work and endure happily. It's an art I have never been able to master. My record: five marriages, five divorces. In short, five failures.”
Those failures had a negative impact on Getty’s children. His oldest son apparently committed suicide and another was described as living a tortured existence. A grandson was kidnapped, and when Getty refused to pay the ransom, had his right ear cut off.
Putting things right
The good news is that, if you’re unhappy with your life now, as long as you spend your time wisely, you still have a chance to put things right.
The key, as I suggested at the start, is to imagine what regrets you might have at the end of your life. And how do you know what those regrets might be? Well, that’s easy. “It’s whatever you regret or wish were different right now,” says Kerry Egan.
“So if you really regret the fact that you have no time for your friends right now? You’re still going to regret that in 30 or 40 or 50 years. The difference is that right now, you have the chance to fix the situation."
Working out what’s important to you is an integral part of the financial planning process. If you want to learn more about financial planning and how it can help you to live a more fulfilled life, free of regret, why not get in touch? Picture: Edu Carvalho via Pexels© RockWealth MMXXII
