Last Wishes: Lessons From the Dying on Living

Death can teach us how to better live our lives

A hospice nurse said that observing older couples increased her faith that long marriages can be "loving and kindly." (Biba Kayewich)

“What I wish for ...” my mother said. She repeated, “What I wish for ...”

Those were her last words, spoken from the basement of consciousness. A few hours later, Mom was gone.

She died on Sept. 8, 1992, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in her bed in her townhouse, surrounded by her six children and their spouses, a few young grandchildren, and her husband. Her breast cancer, which doctors had treated two years earlier, had metastasized into her liver. During her final weeks, she received friends in her home; prayed with them, with us, and alone; and slipped into death as gently and as ladylike as she had lived in life.

For two months, Mom had known, and we had known, that no hope for a cure remained. To the best of my knowledge, she never discussed her impending death with anyone. Yet to me, a 41-year-old husband and father, Mom imparted two of the greatest lessons of my life. Like many my age, I hope for an easy death, but by her courage, resolve, and flashes of humor, Mom banished forever my fear of death itself. Even more importantly, she taught me that living well resulted in dying well.

If we’re paying attention, the dying have some things to tell us.

Home Alone

Near the beginning of the film “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” the 32-year-old Bridget is living alone. In a voiceover, she says, “I suddenly realized that unless something changed soon, I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine and I’d finally die fat and alone, and be found three weeks later, half-eaten by wild dogs.”

We are meant to chuckle at this line, but the truth is that many people die alone all the time in their homes, in hospitals, or elsewhere. More Americans than ever are today living by themselves, with more of us feeling lonely and isolated, and the consequences regarding death are as clear as can be. Death will find more of us alone at home. Some will succumb to an immediate cause such as cardiac arrest, some possibly from a fall or an accident, perhaps lingering without the ability to communicate with anyone.

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These solitary dead remind us that whether we are young or old, if we live alone, we need contact with others. A daily phone call to check in, even a text as short as “All’s well” provides some protection. A friend of mine in her 90s once fell and broke her hip. She was quickly discovered and survived only because a neighbor saw that she hadn’t opened her blinds for the day and called authorities for help. My friend was one of the lucky ones.

Whatever your circumstances, set up a system to keep in daily touch with at least one contact person.

Regrets

To feel some sort of regret at the end of life seems quite human.

“Depend upon it, sir,” Samuel Johnson famously remarked. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” That concentration at the end of life surely rouses in some of us sadness for any harm we’ve done and mistakes we’ve made.

In her book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing,” former palliative caretaker Bronnie Ware sums up the regrets expressed by some of her dying patients. Some wished that they had lived lives truer to themselves, some that they had not worked so hard. Others wished that they had possessed the courage to express their feelings more often, or stayed in better touch with friends, or allowed themselves to be happier.

We note that this inventory of regrets doesn’t include never having owned a Lexus, traveled to the beaches of Tonga, or parachuted from an airplane. Instead, these thoughts in the face of approaching death have to do with our interior selves, how we spent our time, and the friends and family around us.

Of course, some of the dying have other valid reasons for feeling remorse: the man who betrayed his principles and so betrayed his friends, the father who never reconciled with his son, the woman whose alcoholism ended her marriage. When death comes knocking at the door, long-suppressed thoughts of what we have done and what we have failed to do may rush at us like a tidal wave.

But in these confessions by the dying is a hidden form of penance and absolution. When those near death express what they regard as their failings and missed opportunities, they’re telling their listeners to take a different pathway.

Goodness in Death

A woman I know quite well has worked as a nurse in palliative care for more than 10 years. When I asked what her patients might have shared during their final days, she said that a great majority told her they’d lived a full life and were ready to die.

“I don’t remember anyone,” she said, “telling me they wished they’d done something different.” Some of her patients, she recollected, possibly carried unresolved issues from the past, for they would ask to speak to a hospital chaplain.

Sometimes, these patients would fight to stay alive until someone special to them—a son, a daughter—could arrive. She remembered, in particular, one man under her care who, though sunken into a coma and expected to die any moment, nonetheless held onto life for three days.

“It’s our 50th wedding anniversary,” his wife said on the day of his death. “I know that’s why he wanted to be here.”

This hospice nurse also had many memories of families who treated both the ill and each other with kindness and respect.

“I saw men come to the nursing home three times a day to sit with their wives,” she told me. “Observing these couples only increases your faith that long marriages can be loving and kindly.”

The Final Gifts

If we look at what the dying can offer us, we might notice that, different as these people are in personality and character, each one of them is a guide showing us how to live better lives. Their example may be positive or negative, but they bring home to us the importance of friends and family, the healing that might come from rectifying, or at least attempting to set right, broken relationships, and the peace and beauty of a well-balanced life.

That last lesson yields one more gift left unmentioned until now. Hidden in the words of those who had led a full life was gratitude. They may not have said so, but they were clearly thankful for their time here on earth, for knowing and loving others, for being a part of the mystery of existence.

We can be certain that these people, most of them men and women advanced in years, had undergone some of the trials and struggles, the heartaches and sorrows endured by all human beings. Honey and vinegar are both condiments at the feast of life. Yet, the words they spoke to the hospice nurse as they neared the grave came as a benediction, a blessing of appreciation for all that they’d seen and done and felt.

Young or old, good or bad, the dying pass a torch to the living. The wise and observant use that flame to help light the path they’re walking.