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Personal Growth · Life Lessons · Physician Perspective
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying — And the Lessons That Could Change Everything
Bronnie Ware Spent Years Caring for the Dying and Heard the Same Five Things Over and Over. A Physician Who Has Sat at the Bedsides of the Dying Reflects on What Those Final Conversations Actually Reveal — and What We Should Be Doing Differently, Starting Today.
By The Marcopera | Physician · OB-GYN Specialist · ECFMG Certified · Certified Life Coach · Founder, Happysimus
August 2, 2026 · Personal Growth · 15 min read
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What the Dying Teach Us About Living. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying — and the Lessons That Could Change Everything. “Time is the one thing we can’t get back.”
I want to tell you about a room I have been in many times. It is not a dramatic room. There is usually a bed, and a window, and the particular quality of quiet that accumulates in a place where people know that time is measured in days rather than years. I have sat in that room as a medical student, as a physician, as an OB-GYN. I have sat in versions of it in hospitals, in hospices, and in the group home where I worked during my medical school years — a place I have written about before, because it changed me in ways that clinical training alone never could. And the thing that strikes me, every single time, is this: the people who are dying are almost always the most honest people in any room. They have nothing left to protect. No performance left to maintain. And what they say, when they say it, lands differently than anything else you will ever hear. Bronnie Ware was an Australian woman who spent years working in palliative care — caring for people in the final three to twelve weeks of their lives. She was with them for some incredibly special times. She learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions — denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial — and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed, every one of them. That is Bronnie Ware’s own honest account of her patients — and as a physician, I want to hold it respectfully while noting it is personal witness testimony from her specific setting, not a controlled clinical finding. My own experience tells me the capacity for peace at the end is more available than most people expect, though it does not always arrive cleanly or completely for everyone. What I do believe fully is what follows directly from it: Out of those years, she distilled five things. Five regrets. She wrote an internet blog post, and it was viewed by more than three million readers worldwide in its first year. At the request of many, she subsequently wrote a book. It has now been read by over a million people, published in 32 languages, and remains one of the most important pieces of writing on how to actually live. I read this book as a physician who has had his own version of these conversations. And I want to share it with you today not as a book review — but as a genuine, personal reflection on what death teaches us about life. Because the dying, if we are willing to listen, are trying to tell us something. And the tragedy is that most of us will not hear it until it is far too late. About the Book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing By Bronnie Ware — Australian palliative care worker, author, songwriter and TEDx speaker. Originally published as a blog post in 2009 that was read by eight million people. Expanded into a book published in 32 languages. Interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, and hundreds of publications worldwide. Before the Clinic — What a Group Home Taught Me FirstBefore I read Bronnie Ware’s book, I had my own version of the palliative care education she describes. It happened in a group home during my medical school years — a residence for elderly people at varying stages of decline, ranging in age from their sixties to their early nineties. I have written about this place before, because it gave me my first visceral understanding of what healthspan actually looks like when stripped of theory. But it also gave me something else: my first conversations with people who were closer to the end than the beginning. There was one woman in particular. She was in her late eighties. Sharp, forthright, slightly terrifying in the best possible way. We spoke often, and she spoke frankly — about her life, her choices, the things she would have done differently. She had been a devoted wife, a hard worker, a reliable presence in every structure she had belonged to. And lying there, with the particular clarity that comes to people who have nothing left to prove, she said something that has stayed with me across all the clinical years since: “I spent so many years being what everyone needed me to be. I am not sure I ever found out who I was.” I was a medical student. I did not have the language for what she was describing. I understand it now as Regret Number One. Regret One “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. Many patients realised too late that they had left dreams unfulfilled due to choices they made — or avoided — because of what other people expected of them. Parents. Employers. Society. Partners. The accumulated weight of expectation can be enough to crowd out an entire life. I have seen this in clinical practice with painful regularity. The 55-year-old man who spent thirty years in a profession he never chose, who presents with burnout so complete it has become indistinguishable from depression. The woman in her sixties who raised four children, managed a household, supported everyone in her orbit — and who, when I ask about her own needs and desires, looks at me with genuine bewilderment, as though the question is in a language she was never taught. The question is not dramatic. It is simply this: whose life are you actually living? Regret Two “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”Bronnie Ware notes that this one came primarily from men of a certain generation — men who missed their children’s childhoods, their partners’ companionship, the texture of daily life, for careers that felt urgent and turned out to be temporary. But the women she cared for felt it too. Every generation feels it. The particular cruelty of this regret is that it is made up of thousands of individually justifiable decisions. The meeting that could not be skipped. The deadline that could not be moved. The promotion that required the extra year. Each choice made sense in isolation. Together, they added up to a life in which work was the primary character — and everything else was the supporting cast. I remember a patient in his mid-seventies who arrived in hospital for a routine procedure and began, unprompted, to talk about his son. They had not spoken in four years. The estrangement had begun over something he could no longer even precisely remember — a disagreement about money, or maybe a missed occasion, or an accumulation of absences that had finally reached a threshold. He cried quietly when he described it. Not dramatically. Just the quiet grief of someone who understood, with perfect clarity, what he had chosen and what it had cost. Work is not the enemy. But work that consumes the people and the moments it was supposed to be for is a particularly painful kind of loss. At the Bedsides of Cancer Patients — What the Dying Actually SayIn clinical practice, the conversations that happen with patients who know they are dying are unlike any other kind of medical interaction. The usual social constraints fall away. The performance dissolves. What remains is something that I can only describe as radical clarity — a precision of statement and feeling that healthy people almost never achieve, because they have the luxury of deferring the truth to a future that feels safely distant. I have sat with cancer patients in the weeks before their deaths. I will not pretend that those conversations are easy to carry. They are not. But they have shaped my clinical practice and my understanding of what health actually means far more than any textbook or lecture could. And the things people say in those rooms map almost perfectly onto the five regrets Bronnie Ware documented. Not because she made them up — but because she listened carefully enough to hear the pattern that was always there. A woman I cared for — I will call her Margaret, which was not her name — was in her late fifties when her cancer metastasised beyond treatable limits. She was, by every external measure, a successful person. She ran a business. She had raised children who were doing well. She had a partner who loved her. And in the weeks we spent together at the end of her life, the conversation she returned to again and again was not about any of those things. It was about her sister. A relationship that had fractured fifteen years earlier over an argument she could barely reconstruct. She had meant to repair it for a decade and a half. She had meant to pick up the phone, to write the letter, to say the thing that needed saying. And she had not. And now the time for that had passed. I have thought about Margaret whenever I have been tempted to let something important wait for a better moment. Regret Three “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”This is the regret of the unsaid. The “I love you” that was felt but never spoken. The apology that was fully formed internally but never delivered. The gratitude that was real but seemed unnecessary to articulate. The forgiveness that was almost extended but not quite. Emotional suppression emerges from Ware’s work as a stealth destroyer of intimacy and self-awareness — and deathbed wisdom consistently advocates embracing vulnerability as the path to meaningful connections. Margaret’s story is Regret Three made concrete and irreversible. The sister was still alive. The words still existed, unspoken, in the space between them. But the window for delivering them was closing, and Margaret knew it, and the weight of what she had not said was as palpable as any physical symptom she carried. I have observed, across many years of practice, that people hold unsaid things the way they hold physical tension — in the jaw, in the shoulders, in the chronic tightness that no amount of sleep or exercise fully resolves. The body keeps the score of what the mouth refuses to say. The undelivered apology. The unexpressed love. The gratitude that was assumed, and never confirmed. These accumulate. And at the end, when the time for saying them has almost passed, they surface with a weight that is almost physical. Whatever needs to be said — say it. Not eventually. Not when the moment is perfect. Now. The moment is already imperfect, and it is already the best one you will ever have. Regret Four “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”This one is deceptive because it sounds almost minor against the others — until you sit with it and understand what it actually means. Friendship, in the context of the dying, is not nostalgia. It is the recognition that the people who knew you before you became who you were supposed to be — the people who knew the unedited, unpolished version of you — are irreplaceable. And that allowing those relationships to atrophy through the ordinary negligence of a busy life is a loss that cannot be recovered at the end. As I wrote in our post on purpose and what you really want in life, the research on social connection and longevity is unambiguous: relationships are one of the strongest predictors of both healthspan and lifespan. Loneliness is physiologically equivalent to chronic threat. The people who know your full name and your full history and still choose to love you are one of the most potent biological health interventions available. And we treat them like a luxury we can afford to deprioritise when things get busy. Send the message tonight. Not a like on a photograph. A message. To the friend you have been meaning to call. It does not have to be long. It just has to happen. Regret Five “I wish I had let myself be happier.”This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. The happiness deferred until after the mortgage. The joy postponed until after the children had grown. The permission to feel genuinely content held in reserve for the retirement that — if it came at all — arrived alongside a body that no longer had the capacity to enjoy it the way the younger version had imagined. Bronnie Ware reminds her readers that “people are allowed to be happy” and that “they deserve their own permission to be happy.” That sentence is more radical than it sounds. The cultural conditioning that equates happiness with idleness, and seriousness with virtue, runs deep. Allowing yourself to enjoy the ordinary moments of an ordinary day — without guilt, without the sense that you should be working harder or worrying more — is a form of courage that the dying consistently wish they had exercised earlier. I had a patient — a man in his late sixties, diagnosed with a progressive illness that had no cure — who, in one of our conversations, began to laugh. Not at anything in particular. Just a sudden, genuine, uncomplicated laugh that surprised both of us. He said: “You know what the strangest thing is? I feel more present in this room, right now, than I have felt in most of the years I spent supposedly living my life. I spent so long waiting to arrive. I never realised I was already there.” Happiness is not a destination at the end of the to-do list. It is a daily choice — and it can be made right now, in whatever circumstances you currently occupy, if you decide it can. What the Dying Are Really Trying to Tell UsBronnie Ware puts it plainly: “You are going to die. And when you truly face that fact, it gives you courage. The fear isn’t death itself — the fear is reaching the end and knowing you didn’t honour your life or give your dreams a go. People assume they’ll have time later. But that’s not how life works.” What I have noticed, across the years and the bedsides and the conversations that linger long after the clinical shift ends, is that none of the five regrets are about extraordinary failures. Nobody at the end wishes they had been smarter, or more talented, or born into better circumstances. The regrets are almost entirely about ordinary choices — the phone call not made, the feeling not expressed, the life not fully claimed as one’s own. The breathtaking ordinariness of what is actually missed at the end of a life is, I think, the most important insight Bronnie Ware offers. Ware’s personal account — that every patient she cared for found their peace — is a genuinely moving claim, and one that clearly reflects the depth of the work she did. I hold it as her honest witness testimony from her specific patients, rather than as a universal clinical finding. What I can say, from my own experience, is that the capacity for peace is far more available than most people expect. The dying surprise you. They grow in ways that the healthy rarely do, because they no longer have the luxury of deferring the important things. And whether or not peace comes cleanly and completely to every person, the question Ware’s work puts to every living reader is not about the end. But peace at the end does not undo the regret that precedes it. It simply coexists with it. And the question that the five regrets put to every living person is not about the end. It is about right now. What would you change, if you decided today to take the wisdom of the dying seriously? 📋 The Five Regrets Audit — Read These Slowly Regret One: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself.” Where in your life are you living according to someone else’s expectations rather than your own? Name it honestly. Regret Two: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” What relationship, experience, or person is currently losing to your work? Is that the trade you intend to make? Regret Three: “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” What is the most important thing you have not said to someone who needs to hear it? What is stopping you? Regret Four: “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” Who is the friend you have been meaning to contact? What is the actual obstacle? Is it real, or is it just inertia? Regret Five: “I wish I had let myself be happier.” What are you waiting for, before you allow yourself to enjoy what you already have? What condition have you placed on your own contentment? What to Do With This — Today, Not EventuallyI am going to give you Bronnie Ware’s practical lessons, because they are simple enough to be revolutionary and specific enough to be actionable. ☎ Call someone you love today Not a text. Not a like on a post. A phone call. To a parent, a friend, a sibling, a person whose voice you have not heard in longer than you intend. The cost of the call is approximately four minutes. The cost of the conversation you never had is incalculable. 💌 Say the thing that needs to be said The apology. The declaration of love. The gratitude. The forgiveness that is costing you more than the person who needs to receive it. Whatever it is, the right moment is not coming. This moment — imperfect and inconvenient — is the one you have. 🏠 Take the vacation. Start the business. Have the conversation. Whatever you are waiting for permission to do — the thing you describe as a dream but treat as a fantasy — ask yourself what the dying would say about the reason you are waiting. Then ask yourself whether that reason is real, or whether it is just comfortable. 🤖 Stop optimising. Start living. There is a version of self-improvement that has become its own form of deferral — the perpetual preparation for a life that will begin when everything is finally ready. Read the book. Have the dinner. Go to the thing. You do not need to be a better version of yourself first. You need to show up as the version you already are. 💡 Let today be enough Not every day. But today. Let today be a day in which you chose to be present in your own life, to act from what you actually value rather than from what is expedient, and to give yourself permission — just today — to enjoy the fact of being alive and relatively well in a world that offers, if you look, more beauty than you have been stopping to notice. “The dying are not warning us about death. They are warning us about life — specifically, about the life we are living right now, and whether it is actually ours. The five regrets are not about dramatic failures. They are about the quiet, daily choices to defer, to suppress, to comply, to wait. And the extraordinary news is that every single one of them can still be addressed — if you are reading this, right now, you still have time.” — The Marcopera | Happysimus.com 📚 Related Reading on Happysimus: → What Do You Really Want in Life? The Most Important Question You Will Ever Ask Yourself → Why Most People Never Change — And the One Thing That Actually Works → Healthspan vs Lifespan — Do You Know the Difference? → Life Insurance — The Most Important Financial Decision You Are Probably Putting Off ⓘ Note: Patient details in this post have been changed or anonymised to protect privacy and confidentiality. The reflections on clinical experience are the author’s own. Bronnie Ware’s book is available via the links in the sidebar and is recommended without qualification. If this post has surfaced difficult emotions for you about your own mortality or relationships, please reach out to someone you trust — or to a qualified mental health professional who can offer genuine support. About The Marcopera — Physician, OB-GYN Specialist, ECFMG certified, certified life coach, AI educator, and founder of Happysimus.com. Clinical practice has a way of clarifying priorities that no other experience quite matches. The dying are our teachers. The question is whether we are ready to learn from them before we need to. 🔗 Did this resonate? Share it — someone you know needs to read it. | 📚 About the Book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying By Bronnie Ware — Australian palliative care worker, author & TEDx speaker Read by over 1 million people · 32 languages · Originally a 2009 blog post viewed by 8 million in year one 📋 The Five Regrets “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself.” “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” “I wish I had let myself be happier.” ✅ What to Do Today ☎ Call someone you love 💌 Say the unsaid thing 🏠 Take the trip. Start the thing. 👤 Stop waiting to arrive 💡 Let today be enough 📚 Books by The Marcopera Destined for Greatness 50 Golden Rules for Life |
