What the dying regret most isn't what you'd think

On the regret of not having danced more, and the bodies we forget to appreciate until it's too late.

Photo by Kazuo ota on Unsplash

My favorite thing to do in New York City on a Friday morning is throw on a bodysuit, hop on the L train, and spend 90 minutes dancing with a group of strangers of all ages and walks of life in an old church in the Bowery.

I love it not just because it is such a quintessentially New York experience, but because this particular dance class, 5Rhythms—a movement meditation practice created by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s that journeys through five distinct rhythms to free the body and unlock deeper awareness —fills me with a sense of aliveness that is almost transcendent.

Roth’s method, inspired by Gestalt Therapy as well as shamanic and indigenous traditions, is a healing practice as much as it is a dance class. It’s designed to liberate through movement. Even when it doesn’t happen in a church, the freedom that comes when you drop your self-consciousness and let your body move the way it wants to move, feels like something sacred.

As Roth put it: “When we dance, we wake up… We have fun and forget all the heavy shit we carry around. In the dance we get real, get free, get over ourselves.”

Going to “church” on Friday mornings is something I started doing as a direct result of contemplating death. After a season of grief and loss forced me to confront life’s fragility and impermanence, I realized that the time to do the things I really wanted to do, the things that mattered most to me, was right now. Rather unexpectedly, one of the main things that kept coming up was my desire to dance again. Growing up, I did ballet and rhythmic gymnastics (yes, the kind with ribbons and hoops), and I missed that ecstatic feeling of free and graceful movement. I wanted to enjoy my body.

As it turns out, this is not an unusual response to facing one’s mortality.

According to hospice chaplain Kerry Eagan, one of the most common end-of-life regrets is not having danced more—not having truly appreciated the joys and pleasures of being in a body. Eagan says she’s heard this from her patients “hundreds of times.” When faced with the prospect of losing this body, we begin to appreciate the experience of embodiment for the first time—and wish we had enjoyed our bodies more while we still had the chance.

In her beautiful book On Living, Eagan describes how her hospice patients speak of their regrets around their bodies:

Second in intensity to the regret of hating their bodies is the wish of the dying that they had appreciated their bodies more in the course of their lives.

Mind you, it isn’t just health that they wish they had appreciated. It is embodiment itself. It’s the very experience of being in a body, something you might take for granted until faced with the reality that you won’t have a body soon. No matter what you believe happens after death, whether it be an afterlife, reincarnation, or nothing at all, this remains: You will no longer be able to experience this world in this body, ever again. People who are dying face that reality every day.

So they talk about their favorite memories of their bodies… The feel of the water the first time they went skinny dipping. The smell of their babies’ heads. The breeze on their skin that time they made love outside. And dancing. So many stories about dancing. I can’t count the hundreds of times people—more men than women—have closed their eyes and said, when describing USO danced during World War 2, or shagging at South Carolina beach houses, or long, exuberant nights dancing at roadhouses and discos and barns and wherever else there were bodies and music, “If I had only known, I would have danced more.”

Dancing is an expression of freedom, and one we are most likely to take for granted. To whatever extent we are able-bodied, we carry a basic freedom with us: the freedom to move, to experience pleasure, to savor the sensory richness of being in a body. Most of us don’t truly recognize that freedom until we are about to lose it.

Reading Eagan’s book was not the first time I’d heard this regret expressed.

When I first started writing about death, I interviewed death doula and children’s TV writer Darnell Lamont Walker (whose book, Never Can Say Goodbye, comes out in February!). I asked him what he would regret most if he were to die tomorrow, and I was taken aback by his answer: “I wish I had learned ballet.”

To me, this is such an important reminder of what contemplating mortality is really all about. It’s easy to assume that thinking about death will lead us to serious, major life changes: pursuing more purposeful careers, healing broken relationships, cementing our legacy. And sometimes it does. But just as often, it leads us back to the simplest pleasures. It reminds us that the small things are actually the big things, and that everything we love is fleeting.

Coming home to the body

Dancing at sunrise at AfrikaBurn 2016—Tankwa Karoo National Park, South Africa

Like most regrets of the dying, it’s the things we didn’t do (rather than the mistakes or failures) that haunt us. So why do we stop dancing? What keeps us from appreciating and enjoying our bodies while we still have the chance?

Part of the answer is simple and difficult at the same time: being in a body is often painful—sometimes exquisitely so. We carry not only our own pain and trauma, but that of the people who came before us. Our bodies endure loss, injury, stress, illness, violence. They hold more than we can see.

And yet, faced with death—with the reality of life in this body coming to an end—so many of us wish we had appreciated it more. We wish we had savored the embodied joys and pleasures of movement, touch, sensation and rhythm that were always available to us.

For many of us, it’s the weight of unprocessed trauma that keeps the joy of embodiment just out of reach. The FX series Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate, explores this beautifully. (If you haven’t already seen it, go watch it right now—it is incredible.) The series follows a woman in her forties who pursues sexual pleasure and liberation after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. In her quest to finally experience her first orgasm, she must confront the childhood trauma that led to a lifetime of disembodiment and feeling unsafe in her body. Even as her body slowly deteriorates, she is able to come home to it for the first time.

Other times, it’s not trauma so much as the seriousness of adult life that disconnects us from our bodies. Caught up in the treadmill of to-dos, we live almost entirely in our heads. We might start to forget that we even have a body! We become consumed by struggle and obligation, by productivity and survival, and forget to actually enjoy being alive. Somewhere along the way, we lose the plot. We follow the script of unconscious cultural and generational stories that tell us life is supposed to be hard—and that pleasure, especially bodily pleasure, is suspect or sinful.

Alan Watts captures so perfectly: “We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end… But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

For me, it was both. As I got older, I spent less time dancing. Movement (when it happened at all) became goal-oriented and pragmatic: the structured sequences of an asana practice and the utilitarian rhythm of jogging. The busier and more “in my head” I was at any given period of my life, the less I danced, and the less free I felt in my body. When I was grieving, I stopped moving almost altogether. The trauma of sudden overlapping losses sent my nervous system into freeze (and then functional freeze), and I become increasingly disembodied—a state that it took years to begin finding my way out of (still working on it, tbh).

Dance became both a path to healing and an expression of it. This past year, with my new commitment to experiencing the joy of my body, I found myself dancing in all kinds of places: on wedding dance floors, at sunrise at Burning Man, in the living room with my toddler, in the old church on the Bowery on Friday mornings. Looking back, it feels like the best way I could have possibly spent my time.

There’s no quick fix to healing the deeper traumas we experience in this life: physical and emotional abuse, sexual trauma, tragic losses, systemic injustice and oppression. Healing our trauma, and becoming embodied, is a complex and often lifelong journey. But the fruit of our healing—the experience of embodiment—is also the medicine.

Dancing isn’t just something we can enjoy once we’ve healed ourselves. It is one of the most powerful paths to healing. (“If you just set people in motion, they'll heal themselves,” Roth said.) The body isn’t something to overcome; it’s something to come home to, while we still can.