A worker at a hospice in America, a house where people spend their last weeks, wrote down more years later and an ocean away.
My own mother, who worked in a hospice for years, confirmed the same ones at our kitchen table.
Put the three accounts side by side and eleven regrets remain. Not five.
And the overlap between them is the part worth your attention, because it tells you which ones are not personal at all.
Why the lists do not match
Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse, published a blog post in 2009 about what her dying patients told her. It went around the world, and she later turned it into a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
It is the most quoted account there is, and it deserves to be.
But it is one nurse, in one country, writing from her own years spent caring for people who were not going to get better.
Grace Bluerock, an American social worker, spent six years working at a hospice and wrote her own list.
It overlaps with Ware's, and it is longer.
My mother worked in a Dutch hospice for years and recognized the same things without ever having read either of them.
That is the interesting part.
Three people, three countries, no contact with each other, and the same sentences keep coming back.
When a regret shows up in all three, it is not a personality trait. It is closer to a design flaw in how most of us spend a life.
The eleven that keep coming back
Below are the eleven, in the words the dying use.
Each one is written as a question, because that is the only form in which a regret is still useful to you.
You cannot undo someone else's ending. You can answer these today.
Did I love the people close to me out loud?
The most common regret is not a grand one.
It is that affection stayed inside.
People described knowing they loved someone and never quite saying it, or saying it so rarely it did not land.
Ask who has not heard it from you this year, and tell them this week.
Was I the partner or parent I meant to be?
Not whether they were good, but whether they were present.
People spoke about being in the house and not in the room.
The fix is smaller than it sounds: one hour a week that belongs to one person and to nothing else, phone in another room.
Did I work more than my life had room for?
This one recurs in every account.
Bluerock describes a salesman who traveled three times a month while his daughter grew up. He made sure she wanted for nothing, and never really knew her.
He never forgave himself. Your work matters, and so does everything you are trading for it.
Did fear of failing decide more than I did?
People regretted the risks they did not take far more than the ones that went wrong.
Write down what you would still like to do, then cross off the smallest item this month.
The things you dread a little are usually the ones that pay off.
Who did I lose touch with for no real reason?
Friendships rarely end.
They fade because nobody sends the message. In the final weeks people tried to track down old friends and often ran out of time.
There is no better version of that message than the one you send now, however late it feels.
Did I ever say the true thing?
The regret here is silence: opinions never voiced, apologies never made, feelings kept for a better moment that did not come.
One honest sentence, said badly, beats a perfect one you never say.
Did I let myself be happy?
Many realized too late that contentment was a choice they kept postponing until conditions were right.
They had stayed in habits and roles long after those stopped fitting, because changing felt like admitting something.
Did I enjoy any of it?
People described a life spent preparing for a life.
Waiting for the promotion, the house, the moment things would settle.
Ask what you are currently postponing enjoyment until, and whether that condition will ever actually arrive.
Whose life was I living?
The regret Ware names first: living the life expected of you instead of the one you wanted. It is rarely one big decision.
It is a hundred small compromises made out of fear of what other people might think.
Did I look after myself?
Not vanity.
People regretted the body they neglected while chasing everything else, and the years it cost them at the end.
The version of this you can act on today is boring and it works: sleep, movement, and the appointment you keep postponing.
Did I do anything for anyone else?
The last one surprises people.
Almost nobody at the end wishes they had kept more for themselves.
They wish they had given more away, and they are specific about it: time, attention, help that cost them something.
What my mother added
She never framed it as research.
She came home from shifts and said, almost in passing, that people rarely talk about their careers at the end.
They talk about people. About who is in the room and who is not, and about the thing they never got around to saying.
That is what made the lists believable to me long before I read any of them.
Ware and Bluerock had the same experience with strangers.
I had it second hand, at a kitchen table, from someone who had no reason to make it sound profound.
It is also why I stopped treating this as reading material.
A list of regrets you agree with changes nothing. I know, because I agreed with this one for years and lived exactly the same way.
The problem with reading a list like this
You just read eleven sentences and probably recognized three. In a week you will remember one.
That is not a failure of attention. Reading something you agree with feels like it changed you, and then it fades, because agreeing asks nothing of you.
This has been measured, too.
In a 2004 study, four American psychologists split students into two groups. One group got a quick nudge about their own death: a couple of questions, over in a minute or two. The other group was walked slowly through a detailed scene of their own dying, and then asked how they had lived and who they had affected.
Afterward everyone got an envelope of raffle tickets for a hundred-dollar gift voucher. You could take as many as you liked: more tickets meant a better chance of winning, and fewer left for the people coming after you.
The quick-nudge group took more. The group that had stayed with their own dying took fewer, and left more for everyone else. The gap was widest among the students who had said on a questionnaire beforehand that money, fame and looks mattered a lot to them.
Same subject. Opposite direction. The difference was how long they stayed with it.
So if you take one thing from this page, make it small and specific.
Pick the question above that made you uncomfortable, and do the smallest possible version of its answer before the week is out.
Send the message. Make the call. Say the sentence.
Questions people ask
What are the top five regrets of the dying?
Bronnie Ware's five are: living a life others expected of you, working too much, not expressing your feelings, losing touch with friends, and not letting yourself be happier.
It is the best known list, drawn from her own years at the bedsides of dying people in Australia.
Are the regrets of the dying actually researched?
Not as a controlled study.
They come from first-hand accounts by nurses and hospice workers, and their strength is that independent accounts converge.
Treat them as consistent testimony rather than as data, and they hold up well.
Do people regret what they did or what they did not do?
Overwhelmingly what they did not do.
In every account the omissions dominate: the unsent message, the risk avoided, the sentence never said.
Actions that went wrong are remembered, but rarely as the deepest regret.
How do I actually use this instead of just reading it?
Pick one of the eleven questions, the one you liked least, and do the smallest version of its answer within seven days.
Insight fades quickly. A sent message stays sent.
Sources
- Bronnie Ware's book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, grown out of her 2009 blog post
- Grace Bluerock's own list, written up on the American health and wellbeing site mindbodygreen, after her six years of hospice work
- The 2004 study comparing the short and the long death reminder, by four American psychologists led by Philip Cozzolino, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a journal where psychologists publish for each other
- My own mother, who worked in a hospice for years
One last thing
You already know which of the eleven landed.
You probably knew it before you finished reading, and you have been carrying it around for a while.
That is what makes a list like this worth anything.
Nobody at the end is surprised by their own. They had simply run out of room to do something about it.
You still have room.