Twenty-Five Regrets of the Dying, by Shūichi Ōtsu

I stopped by my local Aladin secondhand bookstore for the first time in a while. A book by a hospice physician who had attended around a thousand deaths caught my eye. It was a thousand won, a low enough price to take a chance on it.

Being With People at the End of Life

Hospice work takes place largely out of sight for those of us who are healthy.

Accompanying someone through the last part of life can be demanding, physically and emotionally. I vaguely remembered a character in the American series Heroes working in hospice care. That was about as much as I knew of the work before opening this book.

What Thinking About Death Reveals About Life

Most of us seldom see a person die. Caring for someone close to death is part of a hospice worker’s ordinary day. I wondered whether living so close to death also gives a person time to think about how to live.

Ōtsu drew on caring for roughly a thousand people at the end of their lives when he put together these twenty-five regrets.

Twenty-Five Things People Wished They Had Done

Here are the wishes the book gathers. Reading through them, I found myself thinking about which ones I could still act on.

1. If only I had thanked the people I loved more often.
2. If only I had done the work I really wanted to do.
3. If only I had been a little more humble.
4. If only I had shown more kindness.
5. If only I had done less harm.
6. If only I had had a dream and tried to make it real.
7. If only I had let my emotions carry me away less often.
8. If only I had met the people I wanted to meet.
9. If only I had had a love worth remembering.
10. If only I had spent a little less of my life working.
11. If only I had traveled somewhere I always wanted to go.
12. If only I had left something to show how I lived.
13. If only I had thought seriously about life and death.
14. If only I had gone back to my hometown.
15. If only I had made time to enjoy good food.
16. If only I had married.
17. If only I had had children.
18. If only I had seen my children get married.
19. If only I had thought ahead about my estate.
20. If only I had thought about my funeral.
21. If only I had taken better care of my health.
22. If only I had quit smoking sooner.
23. If only I had made my final wishes known while I was well.
24. If only I had thought more carefully about what treatment meant to me.
25. If only I had learned something of God’s teachings.

A person’s regrets depend on the life they have lived. This is what one hospice physician kept hearing in the course of his work.

In his Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs told the graduates, “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.”

There is no way to know how much time we have. A life without regrets may be impossible. Some of the things that could become regrets are still within reach today.

Reading the book gave me a chance to think about how I want to spend the time I have.

Book Information

Twenty-Five Regrets of the Dying

Author

Shūichi Ōtsu

Publication date

September 18, 2015 (Korean edition)

ISBN-13

9788950961831

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