On Living Until I Die

I am a hospice nurse. I have been for about eighteen months now, and I really, really love it. But working in hospice changes your perspective on life. In fact, as we regularly remind people, hospice isn't about death - it's about life. It's about living what life you have to the fullest. And about leaving life the way you want to. You can't do this work day in and day out without being profoundly affected or applying the principles of hospice to your own life.

An article keeps popping up on my news feed titled "The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying." It's okay. Kind of standard fair for this type of discussion: it talks about hospice patients and what they wish they'd done differently or changed. There are no surprises. "I wish I'd cared less about what people thought of me." "I wish I'd worked less." "I wish I'd spent more time with my family." And it's bullshit. Because people are all unique, and they all regret - or don't regret - different things. I've met people who do wish they had spent more time working, because then their family would be more financially stable after they die. I've worked with others who tell me, "You want me to die happy? They keep my [insert family member here] the hell away from me. We haven't spoken in twelve years, and I'm not about to start now." We do no favors when we generalize people into bland, uniform groups and label them with mediocre platitudes; the dying are no exception. Besides, the important question is not, "What do dying people regret?"

The important question is, "What would you regret if you were dying?"

Photo by Crystal

That's what articles like this one are actually trying to get at, but I suspect fewer people would read an article titled "Top 5 Regrets of the Living." As a culture, we seem to believe that we have an infinite amount of time to fix our regrets - until we are handed that terminal diagnosis. No one cares about your regrets until you're dying.

But maybe you should. I mean, it's your life we're talking about here.

The tricky part, of course, is that you know not the hour. I know it's hard for me to imagine what I might regret in thirty or fifty or eighty years when my number is up. And so we don't reflect on our own mortality, and instead chug along as if we will live forever. Or die tomorrow. YOLO, right? That's almost as ridiculous as believing we're immortal. After all, if I die tomorrow, I'm going to be really pissed about this whole grad school thing.

Personally, I've discovered that the right number is about ten years. I can see myself living another ten years. But if that were all the time I had, what would I change now? What would I chose to do? What would I chose not to do?

Photo by Sarah

I started asking myself these questions seriously about six months ago. I tried to stop looking at my life as something that might go on forever, with each activity a step to greater glory, a new goal, more money, more things, more more. Instead of submitting to the ideals of our culture of scarcity and hysteria, I attempted to figure out what I wanted to do with this one life I had to live.

For me, I decided to drop down to part time.

Now, I love my job. It's incredible, but there are a lot of activities I love. Backpacking. Canoeing. Dog training. Reading. Writing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the main reason to keep working full time is that I'm pretty sure we're supposed to work full time until we die. Or retire. Whichever comes first. After careful thought, I came to the startling revelation that maybe I didn't need more. Maybe what I had was enough. And if there was a way to have more adventures, spend more time reading and learning and playing with my dogs, maybe I would like to do that instead of spending the majority of my time working.

I realize that dropping to part time might not be a viable option for many people. But if you were going to die in ten years, what would you do? What would you change? How would you live? How much is enough?

Photo by Crystal