ESSAY

Paul Anka … and the Number One Deathbed Do-Over Regret

How the chord he struck was felt around the world

“Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret ANYTHING that makes you smile.” — Mark Twain

Back in nineteen sixty-eight, a snot-nosed Canadian lad, the name of Paul Albert Anka, gazed back at the immensity of his life and summarily wrote the song, “I Did It My Way”.

And now, the end is near And so I face the final curtain My friend, I’ll say it clear I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain

I’ve lived a life that’s full I traveled each and every highway And more, much more than this I did it my, my way

Well folks … the snot’s dried. The lad’s eighty-two now and closer to the age when he probably will find it difficult to say without blushing:

Regrets, I’ve had a few But then again, too few to mention

I’ll go out on a limb, though, and say that Mr. Anka, along with a monumental majority of us, will have more than a few empty buckets beside our death beds while we’re waiting to see what happens after we’ve breathed our last. When there’s no one but ourselves left to lie to … when we’re alone under white hospital sheets with our own thoughts, what are some of the do-overs we’re likely to long for?

It would simplify matters if I could provide you with such a list. I did research it. It seemed easy enough:

List, list, list me a list

Psychology Today was good at compiling regrets into a number of tidy categories — and that’s good, I suppose. For their purposes.

AARP didn’t want to be left out. They had their own list for their 38 million members (and growing).

Even Forbes got in the act, and as you can imagine, its focus was more on the professional man or woman, which is good for their purposes as well. Professionals die, too, along with their dreams.

One blogger offered a list of twenty-one dreams that were most often abandoned by death; another listed twenty-four!

Probably in a full two-thirds of these lists, one name kept popping up: Bronnie Ware. Over Mrs. Ware’s career as a palliative care provider, she held the hands of hundreds of the dying. And she took notes. She documented the lessons she learned in her book, Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.

The problem with do-over lists

I have no quarrel with any of the above lists. Most of their facts were reasonable. Most carried the weight of plausibility.

The astute reader may notice that I have already alluded to the biggest problem with all the above do-over lists — including Mrs. Ware’s.

None of them, to my knowledge, considered their subjects’ ages or their levels of life experience. And that’s critical. They just tossed all the old bones and young bones in the same pile. So to speak.

Compared to a ninety-year-old whose body clock is simply winding down, how different would the do-over regrets be if the person whose hand Mrs. Ware is holding is suffering, say, something terminal, like final stage cancer … and he or she is a tender twenty-seven years old?

How much deeper and more varied would the latter’s buckets be if he had been allowed the additional sixty-three years of life experience to add variety to them?

Twenty-seven was Paul Anka’s age when he gave his newly written song — no strings attached — to Frank Sinatra, whose rendition made “I Did It My Way” a world-wide phenomenon.

Sing along with me:

Regrets, I’ve had a few But then again, too few to mention …

If you read my last week’s post …

… you’ll recall that I set the stage for a weekly series of posts. At its writing, I had no idea what the content of those posts might be, only that they would be memoir-ish and bear on my own life experiences; lessons I’ve learned, or not quite learned — and that they would be somehow useful, beyond their entertainment value, to my reader.

How great would that be!

Now that I’ve written this first of the series, I believe I can see what the trellis will be that will guide and support the rest of the articles. I’ll be doing nothing less than to try to fill some buckets now that otherwise would remain empty beside my bed.

I’m not anticipating the winding down of my own clock for a few years yet. And besides, in my saner moments, I think I can say I’m not afraid of dying … however, like Woody Allen, I would just as soon not be there when it happens!*

However … absent having a life-shattering accident or a horrendous heart attack take me out, it’s not unreasonable to accept that sometime within the next fifteen years — twenty years being a stretch — I shall be under those crispy white sheets, will have been given my last sponge bath, and a loved one, I hope, will be holding my hand.

Probably none of us will realize until we’re on our deathbeds how really precious that gift of life was that we slowly began unwrapping on the day we were born.

Takeaway

Since evidence supports that most of us will have our deathbed list of do-over regrets, the more of them we explore now and make a concerted effort to do something about, the more easily we will be able to …

“Break the Rules. Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret ANYTHING that makes you smile.”

An invitation

May I reserve your place on the concrete block beside me next week when I’ll be cracking into my list.

I already know what that first bucket will be that needs filling. And while I know it’s not going to be an easy post for me to share, I’ll be better off for having done it, and it may, in some way, resonate with you.

You have your GPS turned on?

~ ~ ~

*Woody Allen’s actual quote is: “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”