Last semester, I took a course on “Life after death” at my university, the University of Birmingham. I am a theology and religion student, on the first day my classmates and I discussed the idea of a good death. As it turned out, my peers thought that a good death meant dying without regrets. Perhaps if I had taken the class three years earlier, I could have agreed with them. But I didn’t and for me things were completely different. My father died last year, and when he died, he was filled with regret: about the family he left behind and about his future. will never be seen. I was shocked to realize that people think a “good death” is to die without regrets and horrified to learn that this is such a popular idea.
The idea that you can die well has been around since time immemorial. The Greeks and Romans believed that dying well is living manly, acting with honor, and protecting one’s city or homeland. For religious people, dying well often means making one at peace with God, but our ideas about what it means to die well are constantly changing. Today, as Geoffrey Walters has argued in The Journal of Palliative MedicineA good death is often considered a death that is “free from physical pain”.
However, more and more people are interested in dying without unfinished business. A 2008 study of patients who died of lung cancer conclude that in Western society, a good death is “Die without regrets.” Many self-help books give this advice and encourage readers to “read about how [they] can live and die without regrets”. A lot of Websites and books have lists of ways to die without regrets and credit the merit of leaving a gravestone. read “No regret!”
Interestingly, public interest in regret in the West is very recent and first appeared in the early 1980s. In her book Regret: Persistence of the Possible Psychologist Janet Landman defines regret as “the painful cognitive/emotional state of feeling regret for a loss, transgression, omission, or mistake” that is associated with other emotions such as feelings guilt, fear, and shame, but still considered special. While some regrets stem from our bad decisions, some are caused by factors beyond our control.
This is what people do Research on death admit. In outlining their theory of regret, Erika Timmer, Gerben J. Westerhof and Freya Dittmann-Kholi Note that some regrets involve “hard times… and…[a lack of ] educational opportunities.” In other words, everything is out of our hands argumentative that there are only two types of end-of-life regrets: those related to our past and those related to our unprofitable future. When we die, and especially if we die young as my father did, we regret future hopes and dreams that will be “no more” for us. While some end-of-life anxiety arises from our fear of what will happen in the afterlife, a An important ratio is about the life we didn’t live and about “failing to achieve important goals [us] prior to [we] died.”
A central example of end-of-life regret about the future is regret about milestones we’ll miss. For example, my father regrets not being able to attend his daughter’s wedding. He never saw me finish college, meet the love of my life, or get a “real” job. His death was a tragedy for him and for all of us, but was it a “bad death”? Did he “fail” the last hurdle of life just because he didn’t live long enough? I can not believe that.
The assumption in many of the popular interpretations of dying without regret is that regret is a negative emotion we can avoid if we just try hard enough. But is this true? It is increasingly being documented that this is not the case.
Psychologist Robert Kastenbaum has written the purpose of regret is to help people “learn from past mistakes [that] We wouldn’t want to do it again. Regret guides people, they teach people to learn from their past mistakes. If people don’t experience the maturity that comes with regret, they and those around them will suffer. As Landman did DiscussRegrets are just “an unavoidable, natural, or “normal” part of life.” The reason for this is that we can’t just take our pie and eat it: we can’t explore every opportunity, every career path, or every romantic relationship. Regret is simply “a direct consequence of… the possibility of conceiving multiple alternatives.”
“The regret stigma ignores the many meaningful and positive ways that regret shapes our lives. ”
Regretful experiences also have a gender. For example women, report feel more relationship-related regrets than men. This may be due to society’s expectations of women. There is something wrong with a single-gender socializing so that they feel more regret and then condemn them for that emotion. But, as Neal Roese, the author of the book If only: How to turn regrets into opportunitiesYes written, regret is not only inevitable; it can be a positive part of our lives.
Scientific studies on end-of-life care are not immune to regret. In their 2005 study, Timmer, Westerhof and Dittmann-Kohli found that 82% of the 3,917 participants they surveyed “recall the cause of regret”. This is an extremely high percentage, but the reality may be artificially low. Some participants may have denied feeling regret out of pride and as a form of psychological self-protection (as previously Was observed during the coronavirus pandemic among patients who chose not to be vaccinated). Other participants may have taken advantage of the opportunities a late-stage diagnosis presents for everyone. As the study’s authors write, “a person facing a potentially fatal illness would have to resort to… [reorder their] priorities. An impending death can prompt someone to reconcile with family or complete an “unfinished business.” In these situations, regret encourages individuals to be kinder to those around them and correct their mistakes. Regret, in other words, is a good thing.
What we need to realize, however, is that not everyone has the time to correct their mistakes, and regrets about the future don’t necessarily fix them. A person hit by a car doesn’t have time to express their regrets or say goodbye. Someone who died younger than they expected will struggle to let go of the regrets of missed milestones and leave their loved ones behind.
All of this, therefore, means that the cult of “die without regrets” is unfair. It harms those who die young and their families. Unnecessarily stigmatizing the experience of end-of-life regret increases the emotional burden on those who are dying and those who love them. More importantly, the stigma of regret overlooks many of the meaningful and positive ways that regret shapes our lives. If we do not feel regret, we cannot experience emotional maturity or empathize with the pain of others; We will not be human.
Emma Payne is a sophomore in Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK You can follow her on Twitter @ Emma_Payne123
