Passing With Regret

Many patients have expressed their regrets and unfulfilled wishes in the months before they die to Kerry Egan, a hospice Chaplain in South Carolina.  Although emotional, Ms. Egan states, “the stories about the time they waste hating their bodies, abusing it or letting it be abused—the years people spend not appreciating their body until they are close to leaving it—are some of the saddest.”

This body hatred stems not only from the media and magazines, but it can also come from a religious belief about the sinfulness of bodies.  Some women grow up thinking that their very existence in a body that might be sexually attractive to someone else is cause for shame, and their bodies make bad things occur just by existing. 

Unfortunately, it is only as a patient realizes that he or she will lose their body that they can finally realize how truly wonderful it is.  “I’d never admit it to my husband and kids, but more than anything else, it’s my own body I’ll miss most of all.  This body that danced and ate and swam and had sex and made babies.  It’s amazing to think about.  This body actually made my children.  It carried me through this world.  And I’m going to have to leave it.  I don’t have a choice.  And to think I spent all those years criticizing how it looked and never noticing how good it felt—until now when it never feels good.” 

See Kerry Egan, What the Dying Really Regret, CNN, Oct. 17, 2014.