Preparing to Die - a primer

Perhaps your life situation is not quite as drastic as Mandy Pantinkin's character in The Princess Bride, but the three words he says at the end of his famous lines ("My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.") are nonetheless vitally important to your life, even if they weren't much help to Inigo Montoya's soon-to-be-vanquished foe.

We spend our entire lives (almost) not thinking about our death. That's understandable. We are here to live, love, experience, try, succeed, fail and learn. Death happens "later". When we're old, hopefully, and have done all we can.

Yet if we were to think about how we would want to feel at the end of our life a bit more often, it might colour our life choices differently and perhaps help us to make better ones.

I recently raised the topic of  "going to your grave happy" in a mixed group of people in a professional environment and received some interesting reactions. Quite a few people laughed, some nervously. The sense I got was "why talk about death?" from some of the people in the room.

I explained myself. We have to be happy with how we lived our lives, I said. We have to be secure in the choices we made, and that we gave our absolute best while were alive. It's really important, I said.

I didn't get any disagreement. Maybe I planted a few seeds. Who knows?

In Bronnie Ware's brilliant seminal book, "The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying", she lists her most significant observations from her many years working in palliative care, talking to those who were about to depart this Earth. Her top five 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.

I highly recommend reading her book, if you haven't already. Her website is here.

Let's examine these five regrets for a moment. What do you notice? All of them involve loving yourself more. They all involve personal relationships. If these two facts are not obvious at first glance, they will be once you've read her book.

Numbers 1. and 5., for me, go together. Living a life true to yourself and allowing yourself to be happier. This is where therapy is so important. If I could, I would shout this single line from the rooftops. Therapy is so important!

Many people avoid seeing a therapist or counsellor. They think it's an admission of defeat. Of weakness. It's not. It is quite clearly the reverse. If you engage in therapy, whether it be just counselling or psychotherapy, or something deeper such as hypnosis, you are demonstrating that you have the strength and courage to face up to what is wrong in your life, and to change it.

You are prioritising what is important to you, rather than to others, and to indeed allow yourself to be happier by doing what you truly want, and by stopping those self-destructive tendencies that get in your way.

Then perhaps you might not work so hard (number 2.), because you'll see and understand what is truly important (hint: it's your happiness) and then you will be more in touch with what you feel (number 3.) and enjoy spending more time with your friends (number 4.), and your family.

Preparing to die means asking yourself the hard questions. To me, these are straightforward:

1. Do my personal relationships sustain me, or am I being drained and used by others?

2. Am I happy in my career or job, or does it need to change?

3. What do I truly want (and perhaps have never considered) for myself?

4. How do I begin to make the changes needed to answer the above questions?

If you are able to approach your life this way, then you will most certainly have Prepared to Die. When you reach your death bed and are ready to cross over, there will be no fear or regrets. You will have already prepared yourself, and won't have to do it in your final days when it is almost certainly too late.

You owe it to yourself to do this. If you don't, I can pretty much guarantee someone else will not do it for you. 

It's most likely not now or never at this point in your life, but someday soon it might be.