The Unfinished Life

THE DEATHBED TRUTH 🌙

The people who have spent significant time with the dying, the hospice nurses and the palliative care physicians and the family members who were present through the final weeks and months of someone else's departure from this life, report with remarkable consistency that the conversations that occur at the end have a specific character that distinguishes them from almost all the conversations that preceded them, and that character is honesty. The performance incentive that governs most of human social interaction disappears when there is nothing left to gain from performance and when the finitude of remaining time makes dishonesty feel like an unaffordable waste of the hours that are left 😢

What people say when the performance incentive is gone has been documented, informally through memoir and reported conversation and the essays of those who work with the dying, and more formally through research including the work of palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware who wrote extensively about the most common regrets she encountered in her patients. The patterns that emerge from this collected testimony are not surprising when you hear them, which is part of what makes them heartbreaking, because most people already know what matters before the crisis of mortality makes it impossible to pretend otherwise, and the tragedy is not the knowledge but the gap between the knowledge and the living.

THE THINGS THEY WISHED FOR 💭

The wish that appears most consistently, in the accounts of the dying across different cultures and different life circumstances, is not for more achievement or more recognition or more of the material accumulation that consumes so much of the energy of active life. It is for more presence, for more genuine contact with the people they loved, for more of the ordinary specific moments of actual life that the busyness of pursuing the things that seemed important at the time prevented them from inhabiting fully. They wished they had been more present at the dinner table. They wished they had taken the walk instead of finishing the project. They wished they had allowed themselves to be moved by the small beautiful things rather than saving their attention for the significant events that were supposed to justify the waiting.

The second consistent wish is for more honesty in relationships, for the conversations they did not have because they were afraid of conflict or rejection or the disruption of comfortable surface arrangements that both parties had tacitly agreed to maintain. They wished they had told their parent what it had cost them to grow up in their specific family. They wished they had told their partner what they needed before it was too late for the information to be used. They wished they had allowed their children to know who they actually were rather than the version they had been presenting as a parenting strategy. The unsaid things accumulate into a weight that the dying describe as exhausting to have carried.

THE PERMISSION YOU ARE WAITING FOR 🔓

The testimony of the dying contains an implicit message that the living are reluctant to receive because receiving it requires action that is uncomfortable and because the action it requires involves risk that the comfort of ordinary life does not seem to require taking. The message is permission. Permission to not wait. Permission to have the conversation before mortality makes it urgent. Permission to be present in the actual life that is available rather than in the future life you are building toward. Permission to let the person you love know specifically why they matter before the specific knowing becomes a regret rather than a gift.

The life that contains these things does not look different from the outside than the life that does not. It does not require grand gestures or dramatic transformation. It requires the specific quality of attention that is available in any ordinary moment and that most of us deny ourselves in ordinary moments because ordinary moments feel insufficient for the intensity of what we are trying to express, and we wait for the significant occasion, and sometimes the significant occasion arrives and sometimes it does not, and the testimony of the dying suggests fairly clearly which outcome is more common 🌱

WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY 💛

Today contains everything you are waiting for better conditions to do. The call you have been meaning to make. The truth you have been meaning to tell. The experience you have been saving for when you have more time or more money or more of whatever it is you have decided is a prerequisite for living fully. The testimony of the dying is not that life is short in the abstract but that the specific ordinary day you are currently living is the life you will remember at the end, and what you do with today is the answer to the question of what you are actually doing with your time. That is not guilt. It is the most useful information available, offered with remarkable consistency by the only people who have the perspective to give it 💛🌟✨