What missed chances are you going to regret when it’s too late to change?

By David McElroy · February 6, 2012

The older man at the next table looked a bit as though he was lost. I wouldn’t say he looked sad. He seemed more like a man who didn’t know where to go or what to do — almost like a little boy who had lost his parents. I had no idea that he had actually just lost his wife.

Jim and I struck up a casual conversation, but he didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm at first. If I hadn’t made a passing reference to his wife, I’m sure we wouldn’t have talked any further and I wouldn’t have learned his story. He had been sitting in a booth staring aimlessly out the window for close to an hour as I ate and wrote. Since I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring, I joked that his wife must have kicked him out of the house and he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“I buried my wife two weeks ago,” he said softly.

Jim is 72 years old and seemed to be in excellent health. His wife had developed some kind of cancer early last year and it moved into more critical organs as the year went along. He had known for months that she didn’t have much time left. It’s still a shock to have her gone, though. He said he doesn’t quite know what to do.

He had once had his own accounting practice, but he hadn’t really wanted to retire, so he had stuck around working part-time for others ever since he sold his firm. For his entire life, his work and his church activities have taken up the vast majority of his time. He seemed to have done well financially, but he started talking to me about the things that have been on his mind since he lost his wife.

As I started asking Jim questions, it seemed as though he had needed to talk about some things, but he hadn’t quite known how. Before long, though, a lot of things were coming out. Regrets. Missed opportunities. Wishing for a chance to change things.

Jim mostly wishes he had known his wife better and spent more time with her. He thought he was doing the right thing for decade after decade by simply working harder and harder to give her more financial security. He said it was just the thing that men used to do. He thought he was supposed to get married and have kids and work hard at his career and work hard in his church, but he was starting to question what it all meant.

Jim said he realized in the last few months that he had never really gotten to know his wife.

“How can a man spend close to 50 years married to a woman — living in the same house with her — and not really know her?” he asked me. “That’s what I did, but I have no idea how or why.”

It wasn’t until the last few months of his wife’s life when he started getting to know her. He said he would have been offended six months ago at the suggestion that he didn’t really know her, because he assumed he did. It wasn’t until she was lying in a bed dying that they started talking in deeper ways. He discovered things he had done over the years that had hurt her — mostly by not meeting her emotional needs and not spending enough time with her — and he discovered that she was smarter and deeper than he had realized.

He said he knew she was bright, but he discovered that she had real insight on things he had never bothered to ask her about. As she lay dying, she talked a lot and he listened a lot. He found that his longtime wife was intellectually smarter and emotionally deeper than he had ever known. What’s more, he found that listening to her — and thinking about all the years they could have been talking like this — had awakened a hunger in himself for something deeper than he had known he wanted.

This is at least the third time I’ve randomly come across a conversation such as this in the last couple of years. I talk to a lot of random strangers in public, but it still seems odd. Is it a coincidence? Or is God trying to tell me something about looking at life’s regrets before it’s too late to do anything about them?

The conversation reminded me of something I read last year by a woman who worked in hospice care in Australia. Bronnie Ware is a writer and songwriter who spent several years caring for dying people in their homes. She wrote a blog post about “Regrets of the Dying” that she later expanded into a book after the blog post was read by millions of people. (Her blog is called Inspiration and Chai.)

I don’t know how Jim would feel about the five items on Ware’s list, but I’d say it’s at least a good place to start a discussion. See what you think:

1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called “comfort” of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Too many of us are afraid to seek the things we really need or we’re stuck chasing lives that other people have told us should be meaningful to us. I’ve lived long enough to know that living other people’s lives won’t ever make us happy. I wonder, though, how many people are living out scripts that others have given them — playing the roles they’ve been assigned, afraid to take chances to be happy, and afraid to place emotional needs higher than physical comfort.

It’s too late for Jim and his wife to live the life that he’s coming to understand would have been meaningful to him. Maybe he’ll find some other way to make his remaining years worth something. Maybe he can find purpose some other way. I’ll never know.

But what I do know is that a lot of things keep nudging me toward doing something to make my own life more meaningful. The recent cancer scare has forced me to evaluate why I haven’t done certain things (and why I’m alone). It seems as though everything in the universe is pointing toward me and saying, “You have to bring change to your life — or you’ll end up having wasted your time on this Earth.”

I really hope Jim finds some meaning for his life, but I can’t do anything to help him. What I can do is to make sure I keep focused on positive change for my own life. I’m not going to end up like Jim. I hope you won’t, either.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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