unreliable narrators

The most popular piece on the Guardian's site over the weekend has been a short article entitled Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It's based on a blog - now book - by an Australian palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware, who found common themes in the "dying epiphanies" of her patients. In short-form, these common regrets are:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Should these principles be taken as a guide to living? This raises the question of whether people who are close to death are good judges of their own lives. It's a naturally appealing idea. We think of the very old as standing at a summit. Having emerged from the mists, they are able to look back out over the landscape of their life and discern every field, furrow and stream. Ware writes of the "phenomenal clarity" of her patients. Surely, this is when the wisdom stuff kicks in, right?

But what if our old age is as as full of self-justification, self-deception, misrememberings and willed illusions as the rest of our time on earth? In fact, what if it's more so, as the pressure to force the random stuff of experience into a coherent narrative reaches its highest intensity, and our cognitive skills reach their nadir? That combination might produce something that only seems like clarity, or wisdom.

I would say we'll only know when we get there. But of course, that's not true.

Comments

[simon kane]

Interesting. I would also suggest that, for many of us, our concept of a life well-lived (if we've any time on our hands) is influenced by A) an idea of what we wanted to be before now, and B) precisely what we will have judged our life to have been when we die. Maybe the important point there is in the parentheses, but every social structure is a work of the imagination, and without those all we have are brackets.
For example: Take us, alive, now. Do those five points ring true or not? If not, then let's strike the word "pipsqueak" from our vocabulary.
But if they do ring true, then lets not write them off as the deluded self-justification of the dying.

[Andrew Fry]

Interesting point. I read the original blog a month or so ago and hadn't really thought any deeper into it. I think you make a good point though. I guess it's easier to take the thoughts of a terminal patient to heart as 'they've got nothing to lose and no reason to lie', however this may not be the case....