These past months I have been reflecting on the five regrets often felt by those who are dying as they have been identified by hospice nurses.
The first regret is, “I wish I had let myself be happier.”
The second is: “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
The third is: “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
My best friend and his wife have a little girl. She is two years old. She is beautiful and funny and it is an absolute delight to spend time with her when I stay at their house during National Guard drill weekends.
She has moved from being shy when I first arrive, to running to the door yelling my name; and there are few welcomes which are more heartwarming, even if she immediately looks around me to see if I brought the dogs.
One of the things I have found most interesting in watching her grow is watching her personality develop. Slowly, she is becoming her own person and each time I come to visit there is a bit more to discover. She is developing likes and dislikes and she has learned the magical word “no,” which is essential for any two year old.
Mostly she is slowly beginning to experience a full range of human emotions. Now, many of them and the nuances of emotion, will grow and mature with her, but right now, she has the basic four down pat: mad, glad, sad and scared.
The last weekend I was there I had the opportunity to experience a variation of all four of them, mostly glad, which is nice. But what I find the most interesting is the full force of her emotions as she feels them. I never once wondered what she was feeling, even with a limited vocabulary, everyone around her has an absolute understanding of her feelings.
I know as well that she will grow up and learn the complexity of emotions as they develop, and she will learn to control them, as all of us had to do. But what I hope is that she learns the difference between control and repression.
It is easy to confuse the two, and presume that we are supposed to learn to bury our feelings, to mistrust them, deny them and refuse to share them. We may even think this is a good, maybe even a strong and noble thing, but it isn’t. All that happens when we repress and hide our feelings is that people never know what we are thinking, and we feel utterly alone, unknown and isolated.
This is not a great way to live, but it is the way most of us live, and often the way we are taught to live.
Why?
I think the interesting word in this regret is that the dying wished they had the “courage” to express their feelings. Courage is a good word because it is fear that teaches us to repress, to not express our feelings. We are afraid of being weak, of being vulnerable, of losing control. This fear keeps us from being fully human, and so those around us have to guess what we are feeling, and they never know us the way we wish to be known.
There is no great strength, or nobility, in repressing the human expression of ourselves. In fact, it may allow wounds to fester, grudges to grow, and it will keep us from being open to the love that is given us by others, and by the Lord.
It takes courage to be open to our emotional lives, it takes courage and strength to be vulnerable enough to be known and loved. When we speak out the words that express our fears, our angers and our sorrows, we find our hearts are set free, and we are no longer slaves to the hidden pain within us.
When we express our joys, we find those joys doubled in the sharing.
Those who are drawing near to death often look back and wish they had the courage to be human, to be what they were called to be, to be known.
They are also drawing near to the Lord, who in the fullness of His humanity, embraced the gift of His human emotions, expressing His fears, His angers, His sadness and His joys. It is one of the ways that He is fully human, while being fully God. He models for us the courage needed to not simply be alive, but to live.
That means letting go of our fear, that means taking the risk.
That means being known.
