A nurse who specialises in end-of-life care has revealed the one thing people on their deathbed most commonly say, and it’s not quite what most of us might imagine.
Julie McFadden, who has achieved internet fame as "Hospice Nurse Julie,” told podcaster Rob Moore that she’s seen “hundreds” of people die.
And yes, she says, people do often say that they wished that they hadn’t devoted so much of their life to their job. But Julie adds that there’s another last thought that dying people have that’s much more common – but less often mentioned.
She told Rob: “The main thing people say, that I don't hear a lot of people mention, is ‘I wish I would have appreciated my health’.”
Julie adds that she writes a regular “gratitude list” every night, and almost always includes the fact that she can see, and walk, as things that she’s grateful for. She explained: “I like the fact that I can breathe, I'm walking around, I can feel the sunshine – little things like that.
“I think the biggest thing I hear from people [who are] dying is that they wish they would have appreciated how well they how well they felt before.”
Julie, who worked as an Intensive Care Unit nurse for eight years before specialising in end-of-life care, has written a book about dying, in which she explains that it’s something we should all prepare for. She went on: "I believe that people should know about the dying process before they're actually going through it with a loved one or themselves."
Most of us take our health, and the simple fact that we’re alive right now, for granted: “I do it too,” she admits. “I think because of my job it's easier for me to see how how uh once in a lifetime this is fact that everything works together in our bodies to make us live and grow um and I see that in depth too I see how our bodies are biologically built to die.”
Julie says we all need to accept that dying is a perfectly natural process, and nothing to be feared. But working as she does in US healthcare, sh adds that there is one aspect of the American way of death that is particularly cruel.
“Generally speaking it helps to have money to die well which I think is really unfortunate,” Julie says. Because hospice care is not free in the US, many working class Americans are cared for at home in their final moments."
She says the burden of caring for most Americans in their final days tends to fall on people who aren't necessarily in the best position to take it on. She added: “The people who have to take care of you while you're dying at home – which is 24 hour a day care – are is your family. But guess what– no one's paying you to do that.
“If you're working class and you just make enough money to survive here, you don't make enough money to stop working and take care of a dying loved one. So you have to pay someone to do that, and that's really really expensive.
“Only people with pretty extreme wealth can do that, which I think is really unfortunate. So I don't think money does make you happy, but it helps it certainly takes stress off of the situation.”