The Regrets I Hear at the Bedside: Dr. Hideki Wada's New Book on Dying Without Regret

The book is titled, roughly translated, Deathbed Regrets Only a Doctor Knows, published in Japan in November 2025. It comes from Dr. Hideki Wada's more than three decades as a psychiatrist specializing in geriatric care, much of it spent at a hospital dedicated to elderly patients, where he personally attended more than 100 autopsies a year and sat with thousands of patients as they neared the end of their lives.

The book gathers the regrets he heard most often — not as individual anecdotes, but as patterns that repeated across thousands of very different people. And one finding sits underneath almost all of it: the regrets that stayed with people longest were almost never about something they did. They were about something they did not.

Dr. Wada organizes what he heard into five broad categories:

Dr. Wada has written about one particular turning point in his own career: a former corporate executive, a patient of his, who carried his old professional status into the hospital like armor — proud, guarded, difficult with staff. No one came to visit him. Not once, the whole time he was there.

Watching that unfold reportedly changed something in how Dr. Wada thought about his own life, not just his patients. He has since described shifting away from chasing prestige within medicine and toward the work and pursuits that actually mattered to him personally — including filmmaking alongside his medical practice.

It is the kind of story that lands differently depending on which side of it you are standing on — as the patient, or as the family who did not come.

For the Hallorans, the shift was practical, not philosophical. Claire's mother had spent two years gently rationing Frank's favourite foods on his doctor's advice. That week, she stopped rationing the dessert. Claire's uncle, who had not spoken to Frank in nine years over an old disagreement neither fully remembered anymore, got a phone call — awkward, short, and very much worth making.

And the family finally booked the trip to the cottage they had been planning to get to eventually for three summers running — which meant arranging real support at home so getting there did not fall entirely on whoever could take the most time off work.

None of this required ignoring medical advice. It required asking, honestly, which restrictions were still serving Frank's actual quality of life — a question worth asking with a doctor, not instead of one.

This is precisely where the right in-home support changes what is possible, not just what is comfortable.

Our End-of-Life Palliative Care and Companion Care services are built to give families back the time and energy that logistics usually consume — coordinating daily care so a family can take that trip, arranging respite so an adult child can sit and actually talk instead of just managing medications, and providing steady in-home presence so no one has to choose between being there and keeping everything else running.

We also work alongside a family's own physicians to help make space for the small pleasures — a favourite meal, a preferred routine — that matter enormously to quality of life, within a plan the doctor has actually approved.

Every Corelia caregiver is vetted, licensed, and background-checked. And every care plan starts from the same place this whole book does: asking what would actually make the time that is left feel well spent — not just safely managed.

If your family is navigating a serious diagnosis or the later stages of life, the right support can open up time and space you did not know you had. Book a free, no-obligation assessment with a Corelia Health care coordinator.

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Claire and Frank Halloran are illustrative composite examples, not an individual case history. This article summarizes themes from a book published in Japanese, based on secondary reporting and publisher descriptions rather than an official English translation; specific phrasing reflects our own paraphrase, not direct quotation. If this topic brings up grief or loss for you personally, please know that support is available — we are glad to help point you toward it.