The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

How the book came about

Bronnie Ware grew up in Australia and spent her early career in banking. The work paid well and made her miserable. She quit and spent the following years moving between jobs that gave her freedom over money, including bar work on a tropical island, work in England, and songwriting. At one point she also taught songwriting in a women's prison. When she needed work that came with a place to live, she took a job as a live-in carer for an older woman. That led to several years of palliative care, mostly in private homes, sitting with people in their final weeks.

Ware was not a trained nurse when she started. She learned on the job, from the patients, from their families, and from the quiet hours at the bedside. She came to see the role as a privilege: people near death talk about their lives with a candor that most of us never hear.

She noticed that the people she cared for said similar things as they looked back. In 2009 she published a short post on her blog, Inspiration and Chai, called Regrets of the Dying. It listed the five regrets she heard most often. The post spread across the internet and was read by millions of people. The book, first self-published in 2011 through Balboa Press and reissued by Hay House in 2012, expands that list into a memoir. Each regret gets a chapter. Each chapter is told through one or two patients and through Ware's own life at the time: money trouble, loneliness, a period of depression, and the slow decision to put music and writing first.

The book is a memoir of one nurse's experience, not a research study. The five regrets are the patterns Ware heard, in her words, from the people she happened to care for.

Regret 1: I wish I had lived a life true to myself

Ware calls this the most common regret of all. Her example is Grace, a woman in her eighties who had spent more than fifty years married to a man who made every decision. Grace had wanted to travel and to live simply. She never did either. When her husband went into a nursing home, she felt free for the first time in her adult life. Within weeks she was diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Grace asked Ware the same question again and again: why did I not just do what I wanted. She made Ware promise two things: to live true to herself, and to never let other people's expectations run her life. Ware says she thought about that promise every time she faced a hard choice afterward.

Ware's reasoning is that people only see how many dreams they left behind when they look back from the end. Most, she says, had not honored even half of them. Many of those dreams had depended on health, and health gives a freedom that few people notice until it is gone. The regret is rarely about one big missed chance. It is about years of small decisions made to please a parent, a partner or a boss.

Her own version of the lesson is her exit from banking. Her family saw a safe career. She saw a life that was not hers. Leaving cost her money and approval, and the book treats that cost as the price of the first regret avoided.

Regret 2: I wish I had not worked so hard

Ware heard this from every male patient she nursed. Women said it too, but less often, because many women of that generation had not been the main earners. The men missed their children's childhoods and their partner's company, and most of them knew it before the end.

Her example is John. His wife spent years asking him to retire so they could enjoy the time they had left together. He kept delaying. He had reasons each time: one more project, one more year, a little more security. When he finally stopped working, she fell ill and died soon after. John then faced his own death knowing that he had traded the years they wanted for work neither of them needed.

Ware's argument is practical. Most people, she says, work hard to pay for a lifestyle they could simplify. If you need less, you can work less, and the hours you free up are the ones your partner and children remember. She describes her own choice to live cheaply in exchange for free time, including years in a small cottage with little money and no plan beyond the next month. She does not present this as easy. She presents it as a trade that the dying wished they had made.

Regret 3: I wish I had the courage to express my feelings

Ware's example here is Jozsef, an older man who had kept his feelings to himself for decades. He had done it to keep the peace with the people around him. Near the end he talked with Ware about the things he had never said to his family, and about a life that had felt smaller than it needed to be. Saying those things to a nurse, late at night, was the closest he came to saying them at all.

Ware argues that suppressing feelings to avoid conflict does not keep the peace. It builds resentment. People settle for a mediocre existence and never become who they could have been. She also believes that bottled-up bitterness contributed to the illnesses of some of her patients. That is her personal view, not a medical finding.

Her own thread in this chapter is about speaking honestly even when it costs a relationship. Saying what you feel, she argues, either lifts a relationship to a healthier level or ends one that was not working. Both results are better than silence. She applies this to her own family, where honesty about her choices had been avoided for years.

Regret 4: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

Many patients did not understand the value of old friends until their final weeks. By then it was often too late to find them. Ware's example is a woman who asked her to help track down friends she had lost over the years. Some she reached, and those conversations gave her more comfort than anything else in her last days. Others could not be found in the time she had left.

Ware's explanation is simple. People get caught up in their own lives, careers and families. Friendships slide for years without anyone deciding to end them. At the end, she says, nobody is thinking about money or status. They want the people who knew them when they were young, the ones who do not need the story explained.

Her advice is to spend time and effort on friendships now, because they are what people keep when everything else goes. She contrasts this with her own years of moving from place to place, when she let friendships lapse and then had to rebuild them when she was lonely and unwell.

Regret 5: I wish I had let myself be happier

Ware says this regret surprised her because it was so common. Her example is a woman who had lived by habit and by fear of change and had told herself she was content. Only near death did she admit how much she had wanted to laugh, be silly and enjoy herself. Her regret was not about a missed opportunity. It was about a mood she had chosen, day after day, without ever noticing the choice.

Ware's position is that happiness is a choice. Fear of change makes people pretend to themselves and to others that they are content when they are not. Old patterns and habits feel comfortable even when they make a person unhappy. The comfort of familiarity, she says, is not the same as a good life. She lists the things her patients wished they had done more: laughed, played, taken trips, told jokes, acted foolish in front of people they loved.

What Ware does with the lessons

The last part of the book turns the regrets on Ware herself. She describes the depression she went through during these years, a point where she did not want to keep living, and the slow way out of it. She credits the patients. Each death, she says, was a lesson handed to her: take chances, speak up, spend less, keep your friends, and choose joy before it is too late.

She leaves palliative care, puts her music and writing first, and accepts less security in exchange for a life she recognizes as her own. She presents this as the only honest response to what she heard. Having sat with so many people who wished they had lived differently, she could not go back to living in a way she already knew she would regret.

The book ends where it began, with the blog post and the millions of readers who shared it. Ware's conclusion is that the regrets are universal because the causes are universal: fear, habit, other people's expectations, and the belief that there will always be more time.

Who should read it

Read it if you are at a crossroads about work, a relationship or where to live and want a plain reminder of what people say matters at the end. It also suits anyone caring for a dying parent or friend who wants to understand what people in their last weeks tend to think about.