When carer Bronnie Ware wrote a blog in 2009 listing the five things that most haunted her terminally ill patients, she had no idea it would become an internet sensation and transform her life
Top five regrets of the dying
Its the article that refused to well, die. In November 2009, songwriter Bronnie Ware started a blog, gently musing about travel, the natural world and, oddly, possums. But her fourth post changed her life. Drawing on the eight years she spent as a live-in carer for terminally ill patients, she wrote about the five recurring themes that haunted many of the people she cared for. She called it Regrets of the Dying.
She was pleasantly surprised when she started getting emails from strangers commenting on it. But it wasnt until a year later that she realised how popular it had become her website statistics showed that a million people had read it. From that point, the blog took on a life of its own and by 2012, more than eight million people had read the post. She wrote a memoir based on it, which was translated into 27 languages, and became a motivational speaker. When the Guardian wrote about the book and the blog that started it, the article popped up on the websites most-read list, and two years later it is still there, with more than 6.5m page views to date.
Continue reading...