Sophie, look who's talking?  You were the one who was very negative about the article.  Bonnie just shared to us her experience with the dying.   Every individual is different.

Well, good that you are one less lonely people in the world!  Congrats on your book!

Sophie, look who's talking?  You were the one who was very negative about the article.  Bonnie just shared to us her experience with the dying.   Every individual is different.

Well, good that you are one less lonely people in the world!  Congrats on your book!

Sophie, look who's talking?  You were the one who was very negative about the article.  Bonnie just shared to us her experience with the dying.   Every individual is different.

Well, good that you are one less lonely people in the world!  Congrats on your book!

Thanks everyone for all your comments so far, good and bad and in between. Please note that I did not write the words that Bonnie Ware wrote, I copied and pasted the article and then replied with my comments.

Let's keep it interesting, if you have not regrets think about what you may have done differently if given the chance.

Don't be too put off by some of the comments Incog, some of us think it's an interesting thread, or we wouldn't bother to open it in the first place would we?  ;)

Your comment about given the chance would we do things differently is interesting too.  I'm sure we've all spoken out of turn at some point in our lives for instance.  Or maybe we wish we never posted something on social media.  LOL.  We may not actually regret what we said but if we could turn the clock back we might not be so quick to do it again.

Apart from this little guy.  He never has any regrets.  LOL

I think I can sum up my life by the song "My Way". "I've lived a life's that full, I travelled each and every highway, and more, much more than this, I did it my way." "Regrets, I've had a few, but then again to few to mention..........."  Gratitude is so important, I'm so grateful of meeting lovely people who were in the process of dying, and I've sat with them until the end. I was always afraid of dying, but not now, it is a blessed releif . Ever so grateful for my beautiful family and friends.  When people say hurtful remarks about others, It only proves they were bullies when they were young.

I'm afraid Sophie you come across as a very bitter person, always having a dig at someone. What hurtfull remarks have I ever made?, I sometimes stand up for what I believe in  but you act all high and mighty when someone makes a remark that you don't like.  Maybe you should take the log out of your own eye, before opening your mouth.?   

Thanks Toot and Incognito for those encourageing remarks. As the song goes "We're all in This Together", not to

hurt each other, just get along. 

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me

I wish I hadn't worked so hard

I wish I had the courage to express my feelings

I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

I wish that I had let myself be happier 

Must admit I am very surprised at this List Incognito. 

However, we are not all the same, gosh if we were all the same, how boring life would be.

I was approaching 40 and I thought to myself this is my life, why should I be walking around on eggshells!

So I said to myself and my family and friends,  I am me, I have my own life to lead, if you don't like me that is fine!      I want to be able to live my life as I see fit and bring my children up to be loving individuals. Not duplicate copies of their friends.     I do not think people should keep going out of their way to please others, it takes two to tango.

I do not like people that pretend to be a friend when they are not, these people try to judge the friends persona and then act accordingly!  Who are they trying to kid?

So if I don't agree with a statement I will agree to disagree no hard feelings, if you do have hard feelings then we will just have to go our separate ways it really really doesn't bother me!  [I stated]

It is called respect for peoples feelings.

I do not have a wide group of buddies, but I have them all over the planet from Aruba to any point of the map.

We have all become old!    We are nearly all experiencing the stages of life that makes one stop to think. 

As I told the nursing sister yesterday, I have turned into my own mother!  LOL

Mum passed away aged 91 but in her mind she was around 41!  She still could add up a long column of numbers too!   Sparkling blue eyes but suffering from arthritis in the hands, much as she tried to get a workout on the baby grand!  LOL    She spent the WWII years in Liverpool UK with all the bombs dropping around them.   One thing that upset mum was she asked a friend to swamp night duties, so mum had a date with dad that night, sadly the ammunition factory was bombed that night and she lost her friend.

Mum was given a month to live on 12th of December a decade ago,  she had cancer of the Gallbladder very suddenly, it was a shock to us all, we thought she would live to a 100.

Wish I had not worked so hard, that is everyones choice. I don't think any parent should slave their guts off for their children, the children work in with the family not the other way around in my book.  The children should be helping their parents!

I think in the last 30 years especially parents have done much too much for their offspring they expect too much. As for saying these days life is much more difficult for students, well how come so many Asian students do well in their exams in this country, they  are teenagers and have come from an overseas country and still have to experience long hours of study and doing their own grocery shopping and cooking their own meals.

Years ago I had a friend that could not afford [in the UK this is], the heating for their home. They sat huddled up together with the little black and white tv on, the children had to either study in a cold bedroom or in front of the tv and fire.    

I am sure there were several millions in that predicament after WWII.

So why are Australian children so spoilt?

I wish I had the courage to express my feelings?

That is so very very sad, what are people scared of?

That to me sounds like a situation that a person has been totally and utterly brainwashed by someone. What are you really really scared of?    

It is not a case of standing up in front of a million or ten people to give a speech!  Your opinion is just as good as Freda Smiths or Bob Bingle!    Inferiority is very sad.

I wish I had kept in touch with my friends!

That reminds me I have last Christmas found a girlfriend in the UK that I had lost touch with about 20 years ago!  I was so thrilled when I had a reply from this girlfriend, we met at Brownies in 1954!  

The last time I saw my friend we were staying with them in Somerset UK, something happened I knew from the lack of letters.  To cut a long story short I had found her husband a forensic dentist, if there was an accident or plane crash he would be off to all points of the compas.   

Sadly they split up but we are now emailing and not snail mailing.  Have some very happy memories of our childhood together, she used to live around the corner and up the hill!  LOL   She had one little sister and two mischievious younger brothers who went onto become officers on one of the Shaw Savil Lines.

I remember returned from Perth to the UK for two years, we had not seen eachother since we had been nearly 14, she met me off the train at Euston Station in London and she looked at me and said you look no different!    WHAT!  I said I am 21 now and I still look fourteen!  LOL we laughed.

I wish I had let myself be happier.

Apart from ill health episodes I have always tried to see good in life, and I like to be a happy person,  what angers me is cruetly to animals and other cruel acts of the human.  Only in the news today we have a story in India where an office worker reminded a male that he didn't have his face mask on, which he was meant to have worn. So he lost his temper took a chair broke the handle off it and started hitting the woman that reminded him!  He beat her badly and she has ended up in hospital from the report.

Was he mad at himself? Probably this is typical of a weak insecure person, sad.

I cannot understand miserable people, why are so many people angry, why do so many people end up on drugs. Going to a nightclub and getting laced is no fun, if that is all a person sees of fun then they need to get a life and stop blaming others for their drug addiction. 

Ok so some folks will say they take the drugs to hide the pain!   We all have pain we just have to get around it the best we can, from breaking an ankle with all the ligaments broken to boot was not a happy event for me, neither was herniating three discs in my spine, I had to have morphine and get on with life.  No I didn't get addicted to the times I have had morphine, doctor say people do not get addicted to morphine when they need it, it is those that take it for the experience that gets them hooked stupid people.

Well thats my thought on those sentences Incognito!

I guess our lives are not that long, when you are 25 you think it will be a million years before we turn 60 but as you know all too soon, the years arrive and the 70 birthday is celebrated!   [grin]

I am in awe why this person Sophie is in the mood to be bitter to everyone.  She accused me and Incognito, and a couple more of attacking her?  How? She has only to read everyone's comment word by word, there's nothing there to be bitter about.

She first of all commented badly on my pseudoname.  Then she gives technical lessons about computer lingo.  She makes us all appear to be stupid.  

i have read everyone's comments and nothing like Sophie's offending tone.  

P.S.  Por que (right spelling) is Spanish for why

I think the experience of women is very much attached to the era they grow up in. Girls these days have greater expectations of themselves than they did in my day and in turn I expected more from life than my mother. However, when I got married I placed greater emphasis on my husband's career development than my own. I did year 11 and 12 in one year and won 2 scholarships to University, a Commonwealth scholarship and a Teacher's scholarship. Then I fell pregnant and we got married. My husband and I could not both afford to go to university and pay for childcare and since he was already there it was decided that I would work to see him through to a degree before I attempted same. Then we moved to the country and my university options in the 1980's in my region were limited and we got hit with the high mortgage interest rates. By this time we had 3 children and I worked in fruit picking and packing to help us pay our mortgage and other living expenses. I finally found my way to getting my degree and to working in the field I wanted to work but I do regret that early decision that my husband's career was more important than the career that I wanted to pursue. All this way down the track it doesn't seem to matter because we have had a happy life and have got by in difficult times but I made my life and career achievement more complicated by elevating male achievement over my own at such an early age. So at this stage of my life it is no longer a regret but I do understand Incognito when you say you regret undermining your own potential as a young girl by committing to office work rather than getting a degree. I think it might be a fairly common story for women born in the 1950s, 60s and earlier so this is my reason for revealing my story in this regard. It's a story that other women of our era might identify with.

Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888. Innovative, accessible, and psychologically acute, Mansfield’s numerous short stories pioneered the genre’s shape in the 20th century. Her fiction, poetry, journals, and letters cover an array of subjects: the difficulties and ambivalences of families and sexuality, the fragility and vulnerability of relationships, the complexities and insensitivities of the rising middle classes, the social consequences of war, and overwhelmingly the attempt to extract whatever beauty and vitality one can from mundane and increasingly difficult experience. Educated in Wellington and London, Mansfield left New Zealand for England at the age of 19 to begin a career as an author…a very successful one .

Mansfield was plagued by tuberculosis during the last five years of her life. her work was “a kind of purity,” not only one of style or vision but of her whole life, her absolute fidelity “to some spirit of truth which she served.” Above all, Mansfield has consistently been praised for the compression and understatement of her writing, as well as for her capacity to pack complex emotion and thought into the deceptively simple and direct outlines of her work.

(Excerpt taken from the Poetry Foundation).

Since childhood, I have been a great admirer of Katherine Mansfield..her writings have greatly influenced me.