The quiet fear of reaching the end of life with regrets.

The pain we may experience on our death bed is not just physical, but emotional.  I’ve worked as the clinical social worker on several Hospice teams in the past and one of the most difficult things for people to overcome is the heavy grief/sorrow of too many regrets as they look back at their lives.  My job in these cases was to help people to grieve that loss as well as figure out how some of the regrets may have been life lessons.  However, many of these regrets may be things that it’s too late to change. And that’s really hard to accept.

I think most people have a quiet fear that they'll have regrets at the end of life - of not having lived to their full potential or not having had much fun or having spent too much time stressed-out.  The list is endless.  

So how do we prevent that?  

These fears often surface around mid-life.  I’d say it’s this fear of regrets in particular that drives what is known as a midlife crisis.  The word “surface” is perhaps not the most accurate because  that’s not always the case…the fears often stay just below the surface or subconscious - affecting our moods, behaviors and sense of self without us knowing it.  

We can learn to listen carefully to the quiet thoughts that we may not want to face.  We can choose to raise our awareness of our subconscious motivations and then we have more conscious choice in life!

With awareness of this quiet fear, we can choose differently.  We can back up a bit and look at our own life - where we’ve been, who we are now and where we’re going - and we can decide to heal the past (for example) so that the regrets become lessons learned. We can choose to hone our future focus and moment-to-moment focus on what we really want in life.  But it has to start with awareness.

One of the lessons I learned from working with people who were dying, is to grieve a little bit each day…to acknowledge that it could be the last day of your life.  This practice helps us to have gratitude, but it also helps us to choose the life we want - to choose to be our best selves or at least figure out what and who that is.

There’s one Hospice patient who I will never forget. I was so honored to be a part of this relatively young special human’s dying process.  I could go on about how he chose to face death…with such dignity, clarity, sense of humor and presence.  As I reflect on his process, I think he was able to face death in this way because he had lived his best life and had very few, if any regrets. 

That’s what I’m aiming for if I have the chance to face death head-on.