Some people truly take secrets with them to the grave while others have to get them off their chest before it’s too late. Have you ever wondered what people confess when it’s their last chance? Here are 14 stories about heartbreaking deathbed confessions. This content has been edited for clarity.
Deep Dark Secrets
“I’m a registered nurse, male, white, and work with many elderly people. I had a 90-year-old man once talk about how he had been a part of a violent organization in his youth and how ashamed he was of taking part in several lynchings and other assaults on targeted people groups. He was always very polite and loving towards our staff but I could tell how deeply his past haunted him. He asked me not to share this information with anyone.
In the last days before he became too weak to speak anymore, he asked one of the nurses I worked with if she would forgive him. She didn’t know what he was asking forgiveness for but told him she did and helped him try to forgive himself. He passed away peacefully a couple of days later.
I also had a woman who was over 100 years old tells me she had been badly mistreated by her first husband but was stuck in the marriage because of the culture at that time. He’d been thrown from a horse (that he’d also been very cruel to) and kicked several times. She ignored his cries for help and let him die. She said she had never told anyone and had felt guilty for it for over 80 years and could still hear him screaming for help.
We talked about it for a long time because I worked the night shift and it gave me a chance to spend extra time with some patients. My experience working with people with PTSD helped me to help her see that she was acting to protect herself and others from him and responding from a place of natural fear. Before she passed, she told me I had helped her find peace with it.”
Seeking Forgiveness
“In my time as a registered nurse, I’ve heard many deathbed confessions. The darker ones are far harder to handle. I always have to remain in control and professional but it gets really difficult at times.
There is one patient who springs to mind: an elderly gentleman who was dying and in a lot of pain. Before he passed away, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and confessed to me that he had mistreated his five-year-old daughter until she eventually passed away. He wanted forgiveness and asked if I forgave him. I won’t lie to you, I wanted to let go of his hand. I wanted to leave his side because I had lost all care and sorrow for him.
When I let go of his hand and looked at him, he looked back at me, and then he was gone. I’d only been a nurse for about six months at that time and despite what he’d done, I felt guilty that he confessed and I didn’t forgive him. He probably didn’t deserve forgiveness but I wasn’t professional for him and I should have been.”
Guilt
“One night, I was sitting with a man in his seventies who was dying. I remember feeling sorry for him and thinking to myself that he didn’t deserve this. Bizarrely, no one came to see him, not even his kids. He also had a scar on his left hand where his own son had once stabbed him.
That night, he told me that he had done many bad things in his life and started crying. He told me he’d always tried to be good but couldn’t help himself. I squeezed his hand and told him I would stay with him. He then confessed the guilt he was carrying. He mistreated his own children for years. He said he had enjoyed it and still did and couldn’t help the way he was.
When he asked, ‘Will I be forgiven?’ I was silent.
I was stunned and didn’t know what to say. He had said all of this in a few minutes and it was a lot to take in. I realized why this man’s family hadn’t come to visit him and why his son had stabbed him.
He then asked, ‘If you were my daughter, would you forgive me?’
‘No, I personally wouldn’t. But I’m not your daughter so I can’t speak for her,’ I replied.
After I answered him, he smiled, closed his eyes, and was gone just like that.
It was a horrible confession to hear and it still creeps me out to this day. After he passed and his belongings needed to be collected, the family told the hospital they didn’t want anything back. I can’t say I blame them.”
Sisters
“Many years ago, I worked as a nurse in my hometown before moving to New York City. An older male patient was dying whose two sisters had devoted their lives to him. The sisters were in their 60s and 70s and hovered over him when they were at the hospital.
When the sisters weren’t around, he said to me, ‘I was in WWII. I was never in combat but got sick in the Pacific on one of the islands. Then I came home and my father died so I took over the family business. I thought I was a big man because I was in the war and ran a business.
My sisters depended on me. I made them dependent on me. They waited on me hand and foot. They cooked and cleaned while I held the purse strings. I made them afraid. They didn’t date because I didn’t want them to and they never married. They took care of me and now I’m dying. I ruined their lives. They should’ve gotten married and had children and grandchildren. Now they’ll have nothing. They won’t have me and I sold the business with hardly any money left in it. They’re not going to know what to do.’
I said, ‘You’d better tell them right now, mister. You better tell them where all the papers are, the bank account, the deed to the house, the mortgage, and any stocks or bonds. Call your lawyer and tell him to get your sisters in his office so he can let them know where they’re at and what’s going to happen to them. This is your last chance to make things better for them.’
When I walked past his room later, I heard him talking to his lawyer. I was off work the next three days but heard he died while I was gone.”
Confession
“As a care assistant, I have taken care of two individuals who ended up passing away. One was a woman who fully believed that spiritual healing, extensive supplementation, ‘toxic’ foot bath removals, and several other alternative healing methods would fully heal her MS (multiple sclerosis).
I was there when she realized all of these methods were doing nothing to cure her disease and that she was going to die. It was not a good day for her. In tears, she confessed to me that she had become pregnant a second time many years before. She had just lost her mobility, was already raising her son by herself and knew the new father wouldn’t be there for any of them. She couldn’t face that alone and didn’t go through with the pregnancy. She had never told anyone. With tears in her eyes, she begged me to tell her she had made the right decision.
I had no answers for her. I knew what she was looking for was reassurance that she had made the right choice, but I didn’t feel right making that call.
Instead, I said ‘That sounds like a really hard situation you were put in. I don’t think anyone can judge you for your choice and I’m very sorry for the pain it has brought you.’
She wound up laughing even through her tears. She said I had a ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ look and could tell how much I was ill-prepared for the situation. She thanked me, though. About a month later, she passed away.”
Father
“When I was in school, I was shadowing an ICU (intensive care unit) nurse and we were taking care of an elderly woman dying of brain cancer. One day when her family went home for the night, we were getting her ready for bed and she randomly blurted out,
‘Should I tell him they’re not his?’
She was referring to her children and husband who had just left. She elaborated and told us that their two children are both another man’s! And not just any man’s, but her husband’s childhood best friend! What made it even crazier was that her children were probably 50 years old! I had no idea how that stayed a secret for so long.
Fast forward to the next morning, I saw an unfamiliar older gentleman in her room. Before I said anything to anyone, the nurse I was shadowing whispered to me that that was the childhood best friend. I didn’t know whether or not they were still messing around, but I don’t think I have ever seen a secret 50-year-old love triangle.
We told her that she should not tell her husband and children. If it had been a secret that long, there was no point in telling them on her deathbed. I still wonder if we were right about that.”
Truth Comes Out
“I was in the surgery wing one day when I noticed a woman comforting her husband less than ten feet away. The husband was about to go into surgery and the words being exchanged were really meaningful because the surgery could’ve gone one way or the other.
The husband seemed a bit of a rough-and-tumble old-school guy with a bit of polish. His wife seemed like a reserved, well-spoken, kind-hearted woman. They kept reassuring each other about the surgery while I was within earshot.
The wife told him she needed to go do something and he said not to worry, it would be a while before they take him back.
When she left, he grabbed his phone and started crying as someone answered, ‘We’re here together and waiting, everything is fine.’
He kept sobbing while telling this person how terrible he had been to his wife their whole marriage. He was saying how sorry he was and how wonderful his wife had been. It sounded like he was speaking to a very close family member and kept confessing how terribly he treated his wife by cheating and being selfish. It seemed the person on the other end of the line was consoling him. The phone call ended with him sobbing alone while trying to contain himself.
His loving, caring wife came back into the room and kissed her husband, held his hand, and picked up where she left off.
This happened 30 years ago but it left a lasting impression. I still remember it like it was yesterday.”
I Know
“For whatever reason, I’ve heard ‘I’m sorry’ a lot of times. I’ve given it much thought. At first, when I heard this from a patient, I thought she was apologizing to me. She seemed like she was upset for ‘putting us out,’ like her dying was a major inconvenience to me and the staff. She seemed to regret that her death was causing us extra work or time in our shift. I think I said something like ‘it’s okay’ while I continued to do my work.
‘I’m sorry’ continued to come up with some frequency. Right before I would sedate someone and place them on a ventilator, they would ask to remove the oxygen mask and whisper ‘I’m sorry.’ I watched someone who had a cardiac arrhythmia go in and out of a perfusing rhythm they would look up at the staff with just a second of clarity and say ‘I’m sorry.’
It started happening so often that whenever I heard those words from a patient, I finally came to a place where I would stop what I was doing to make eye contact and touch them and say ‘I know’ instead of saying something superficial like ‘it’s okay.’
It didn’t have anything to do with me or the staff. The comment meant something else entirely. I came to believe that it was an actual apology for dying. As though dying was a failure of sorts. A weakness. I decided the least I could do was offer forgiveness. I could do my best to make it okay and help them die in peace. I can’t imagine a worse feeling at that time than the feeling of letting someone down by a process you have no control over.
I changed from ‘it’s okay’ to ‘I know’ and finally, ‘it’s okay, I know, you did nothing wrong.’”
First Date
“I’m a scrub nurse. My job is to assist the surgeon during surgeries. I was preparing an elderly patient for a pretty high-risk surgery. There was a good chance he was going to be fine but there was also a chance things could’ve gone south and he knew this.
While the nursing assistant was doing her thing getting the anesthesia ready, I was standing next to him going over his chart.
After signing the releases he said to me, ‘I need you to tell my wife I’m sorry for all the times I raised my voice at her. There weren’t many times. But right now I wish there weren’t any.’
That was the first time I ever got choked up at the bedside. Thank goodness for masks because it helped hide my expression. I so badly wanted to tell him everything was going to be okay but no one knew if it was going to be.
I said back to him, ‘I’ll do anything you need me to, but right now let’s think about some happy memories before you go under.’
I asked him to tell me about his and his wife’s first date.
Once he was under, I excused myself before scrubbing in to stop myself from crying.”
I’m Okay
“I will never forget a patient around 60 years old I met on my oncology rotation. She suffered from a relapse of acute myeloid leukemia after a bone marrow transplantation and also had to fight an uneven battle against fungal pneumonia.
The chances of her surviving were pretty slim, which she knew. The thing is, one minute in her presence was enough to make you completely forget about her grim fate. She was cunningly funny in a dirty kind of way, making the most unexpected jokes to the unassuming doctors on the rounds.
One day, things looked particularly bad. Her whole family was there in her room and she was sitting on the bed, rather than lying in it, because that way she could breathe more easily and see everyone. I had come into her room to examine her, but she told me I didn’t have to. She made one of her dirty jokes and everyone laughed, even the ones with tears in their eyes. I couldn’t help but wonder how she was able to think as clearly and talk as normal despite her severe sepsis. She was talking in complete sentences and refused any morphine.
I remember trying to hold back tears, because I somehow knew, as did she. She looked around at her family, then at me, and said,
‘I am okay.’
She looked at her family again and laid her head back against the propped-up pillow, finally closing her eyes as if to sleep. Not one minute went by before she passed away.
I have never witnessed a patient with such a clear state of mind immediately before dying and there she was, lying peacefully asleep in the company of those who loved her. She was indeed okay.”
Visiting Hours
“I recently cared for a woman in her 80s who had multiple acute strokes in a short amount of time. A week before, she had been independent, riding her horse every day, and teaching part-time at the local school, despite her age.
By the time she got to me, she was completely nonverbal, incontinent, and unable to feed herself. I had a feeling that she was neurologically intact enough to understand what was going on, so I talked to her as much as I could when I was in the room. I talked to her about her daughters who had called every day, her husband (who hadn’t called, but I left that part out), the weather, her horses, and her students who had sent a card.
On the last day of my workweek, her daughter from out of state had finally found a flight up. They sat in silence and held hands for hours. Visiting hours ended right at shift change, so I walked in to give a report as the daughter was saying goodbye.
The patient then spoke what I knew were going to be her last words, ‘I’ll always be looking after you,’ and pointed to her daughter, then to me, and then fell asleep.
Two days later when I came back to work, I was informed she had passed away in the night.”
Love
“I was working in a long-term care facility in the 90s. We had a patient named John who came in with a terminal disease. The staff loved this man. He was so kind and his wife of over 60 years attended to his every need. We quickly became close to his family. I wasn’t working in his unit the evening he died, but all the nurses were aware he was going pass away during our shift and were checking on him/helping his nurse as much as we could.
During the night med pass, another nurse and I walked into his room where his nurse was by his bedside. He was obviously taking his last breaths and his sobbing wife was crying out loud,
‘John, come back, don’t leave me!’
Every so often he would visibly pull himself back, trying to stay. His silent lips were forming the word ‘love’ as he tried to tell his wife one more time he loved her. Back and forth this went on for several seconds but it felt like several minutes. We nurses stood there with tears streaming down our faces. This was one of the few times I have cried in a patient’s room.
After he passed, his wife sobbed harder than I thought humanly possible, while we tried to get our act together and do all that needed done. Thank God it was close to the end of the shift. Professionalism is attending to your other patients without any sign that someone died, let alone that your heart had just torn a little!
The next day, we realized that each one of us had to pull over at least once on the way home because we were crying too hard to drive. Anytime I think of the power of love, I think of John and his wife. A love so powerful, this faithful husband tried desperately to cling to this earth and his sweetheart. The memory is bittersweet and haunts me to this day.”
Hospice
“I was a hospice nurse for many years. Surprisingly, It was a super gratifying job. As a ‘regular’ nurse, you are rarely offered thanks. Hospice nursing is an island unto itself. It’s mostly peaceful, lots of times sad, and often a blessing.
This is sad, but also creepy, and I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it. I had a 20-year-old kid who got into the wrong crowd and was dying of primary liver cancer. He was super unusual, aggressive, and terminal. He was angry at the universe.
His family was there to comfort him, but he literally spit in their faces. Every ounce of energy he had left was angry and mean and ugly. His mom would beg him to lighten up and accept love into his heart but he would swing at her and tell her to shut up. The family remained by his side in hopes he would chill out at the end.
In his last day, hours, and moments, he was angry. The family called me into the room and told me they thought he was going (he wasn’t responding, had patchy breathing, with glossy eyes and cold skin). His lovely mother, in her dearest attempt, whispered to him to go towards the light.
With his dying breath, he opened his eyes, looked at her, and said, ‘Shut up!’
A second or two later, he slowly turned his head to the left and got the most horrific look on his face, as if he was looking at something we couldn’t see.
Horrified, like in a bad movie, his face contorted and he screamed with his last breath, eyes wide, ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no!’
He then made a guttural noise and promptly fell back into the bed and died. Every family member was shaking and too frightened to speak. I left the room and took two days off. I don’t care if I never find out what he saw.”
Fire
“I live in the Pacific NW and there was a rupture of the Olympic Pipeline in Bellingham in 1999. The petroleum flowed into Whatcom Creek. There were two little boys playing in the creek behind one of their houses with a barbecue lighter. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the petroleum flowing into the creek was set on fire by the lighter they were playing with. It became a conflagration. We could see the thick black smoke pouring into the air from 25 miles away.
From what I remember, one of the older brothers and a couple of his friends ran out to the creek behind their house and brought the boys out of the water. The little guys were severely burnt but between shock and adrenaline, they didn’t realize how hurt they were. I still cry when I think about it to this day that the little guys thought that they had caused the explosion by playing in the creek with a lighter.
What’s worse, and actually haunts me, is one of the boys telling the rescuers,
‘Oh, my mom is going to be so mad that I ruined my new clothes.’
These little guys died the next day of their burns. It was an unbearable account.”
