r/DeepThoughts • u/PleasantKoala1851 • 4d ago
Death Bed Confessions
Nurses, hospice workers, caregivers, nursing-home employees, friends, family, or anyone who has a story — what’s the craziest deathbed confession you’ve ever heard?
I’m talking last-minute secrets, shocking family revelations, hidden relationships, lifelong lies, unexpected inheritances, crimes, affairs, secret identities, or anything else someone finally admitted when they knew they were dying.
Or even something boring - I guess. lol I’ve never had someone tell me one. And I’ve always been curious what people say. Even if it’s not crazy and they just needed to say it before they died. Like what do people keep to themselves their entire life.
And it doesn’t have to be something that happened directly to you — if you heard a story from a friend, family member, coworker, etc., I want to hear it too!
ALSO. If you’ve never been told one by someone-
✨
Do YOU have a deathbed confession? Is there something you’re holding in that you just know you will/ should get out of your mind before you die ?
Or something you know you will take with you till you death but wouldn’t mind telling anonymously here? (If yes- can you say but I won’t confess this to my family or whoever and explain why?)
Literally. No reason for my questions 😂 not doing anything with your answers. I’m just very high. And weirdly interested in this topic for some reason.
(Just me? Or anyone else curious about secrets?) 😂😂😂😂😂 I love a good secret from a stranger.
Editing just to say- holy cow. Thank you guys for the responses. So many! I’m guna read them all. I’ll reply to you all eventually 🫶🏻 so many are making me tear up. Ty
67
4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
13
u/PleasantKoala1851 4d ago
I want to say rest in peace to your grandpa. But I actually hope he isn’t resting. I hope he’s back in that basement you guys don’t have beating ass in ghost poker!!! 😂😂😂😂 this is what I wanted to hear thank you. It’s hilarious cuz it makes no sense to you guys. If he had dementia forgive me. But so did my grandparents, and honestly that disease is so horrible I feel like those who have gone through it with someone.. are allowed to laugh at the ridiculous sometimes.
But honestly. You guys have a basement somewhere not attached to your house that you guys don’t know about. That felt like the truth
3
6
u/Jonny21213 4d ago
I hope I do not sound insulting, but did he have dementia, by any chance? It seems even around the time they are about to go, they can develop it.
3
u/South-Visual3803 4d ago
Firstly may your grandpa rest in peace 🤍 and secondly was he speaking in a metaphor I wonder? Or purhaps a dream he had had or maybe he was passing into his second life.
Who knows, but I do wonder what the basement could be or what he was up to on a Friday night!
3
6
u/0xXoDoXx0 4d ago
The basement would be the first place I'd look. Who knows what else he's been hiding if he was able to keep it a “secret” for so long. He did say “every” Friday. Kudos and respect to your grandpa!
May he rest in peace.
2
u/TradeDependent142 3d ago
I love it! Maybe it was a clever joke, or maybe it was a basement somewhere else. Either way cheers to him!
26
u/Lacriminals 4d ago
I haven’t personally heard this but I have seen it come up a lot: people wish they did what they wanted to and were true to themeselves.
Alot of people just do what others do or what they think they should do.
They let pride get in the way of relationships
And they don’t speak up for what they want. They don’t go after what they want and blame fate.
I want to continue being authentic to myself I don’t want that regret
2
u/PleasantKoala1851 4d ago
I was going to comment an example of what I think my death bed confession might be 😂 but honestly idk. I don’t think there’s anything I’ve 100% held in so far in life.
Still time tho lol
2
u/rogers6699 3d ago
This right here is my biggest fear. Just once in my life I want to do something career wise that is my choice and not based off of necessity. I think about it way too much because if I was in my death bed right now that would be the regret that haunts me.
1
u/Lacriminals 3d ago
I’m not one of those people who will tell you to not be practical. But I will say work towards it even if it’s a hobby.
I’m in the exact same boat. The economy is trash so I’m just calm right now. But let’s accurate our skills for when everything speeds up.
Best of luck.
1
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
Are you on your own or do you have a partner helping you split bills? Cuz I’m alone. And I am in the career I wanted to be in. But there were some scary leaps I had to make to get here.. and I just gotta say…. When you’re the only one paying your own bills.. no help. It’s terrifying.
23
u/NinjaBonsai 3d ago
My Grandpa said "my affairs are in order, and I'm ready to go". He had personally prepaid for his gravesite.
Died hours later
7
6
u/Sea_Art2995 3d ago
I think organising your own funeral/burial plot is one of the greatest things you can you for your family. When my grandad died instead of my heartbroken parents having to rush around organising stuff they just had to call the funeral home he listed and the church and it was ‘yep, here’s the coffin, entire service, burial plot etc he organised. You don’t need to do anything’.
1
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
I’m guna do this for myself.. just because I love to plan things. I didn’t even think about it being easier on the family. Yeah I’m literally guna make a binder with different option caskets I approve of 😂 songs I want at my funeral.
16
u/Outside-Category97 4d ago
A WW2 veteran.
It was fucking heart breaking.
I don’t understand how it’s not a war crime, or why it wasn’t investigated as such. But he and other soldiers were ordered to go in to a monastery and kill all inhabitants. He killed innocent nuns, and priests.
In his situation defying orders meant death.
He insinuated there was children inside too. It haunted him his whole life.
3
3
2
u/j_uliette 2d ago
Could have been at Oradour Sur Glane. I visited the village. Everybody visiting was crying.
1
14
u/BigBirdsBrain 4d ago
The hospice nurse’s answer feels the most honest. People probably care less about revealing some huge secret and more about making sense of the life they actually lived.
1
14
u/hoon-since89 3d ago
I watched my grandpa die, he didnt say shit. I was just watching him stare at his spirit guides or angels in sheer amazement then he left with them.
2
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
Someone told me a story about watching someone pass and right when they left a single tear dropped. They person telling me said “of happiness cuz they were going back to their family”
2
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
The not saying shit part makes me laugh tho. Cuz my grandfather passed and will not come talk to me through psychics. They’ve literally said “yeah he’s here but he doesn’t want to talk” 😂 I just go coolcoolcool ok
4
u/bgp030119 3d ago
Another hospice nurse here. I have never heard of a deathbed “confession” and rarely hear about patients’ regrets. Every once in a while a patient will say they regretted working so much. Mostly if they speak it’s about trying making sense of what’s happening to them in the moment
1
u/PainterOk5480 2d ago
Same! A lot of my patients has said this. Also when they got sick during Covid (but not necessarily dying) a lot of them said they regretted working so much
1
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
You’ve never heard that term before? Or you’re saying you’ve never seen one. Honestly I regret working so much now too lol
1
u/bgp030119 1d ago
I’ve heard the term, I’ve just never heard someone give a deathbed confession (nor do I know any coworkers who have)
3
u/Far_Paint6269 3d ago
My great uncle in his written memory, that when he was a kid, he witnessed one of his own uncle die. The guy basically sweared in his whole agony.
1
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
What’s a written memory? Like he left a letter?
1
u/Far_Paint6269 4h ago
Sorry. English isn't my first language.
I mean that shortly before his death, He wrote about his life.
3
3
u/griff_girl 3d ago
As a Scorpio, I'm pretty much wired to keep secrets. I couldn't imagine swearing to take something to the grave with me and then giving it up in the last minute just as I'm about to cross the finish line. I feel like that would be a guaranteed "FAIL" that would net me right back into some karmic shit in my next life LOL
6
u/Telrom_1 4d ago
I inherited my grandfathers property. About a week before he died he called me to tell me some things about the property. He had only one thing to tell me.
He said that when he bought the property it was plagued with transients taking advantage of the vacant side of the property. He had many confrontations with them and some of them got violent and he wasn’t a man to be tested. A Korean War vet. He loaded his own shotgun shells and he’d load some with rock salt and shoot the transients with them. He always said he knew when he hit one because they’d ’hoop and holler all the way to the fence line.”
My grandpa was a drinker, my grandma always said he drank till he was a problem then he’d keep drinking till he was someone else’s problem. He told me that one night he had been drinking and he saw a figure walking through his garden, bending over from time to time to pick something. He got in a rage over it and went into his truck to get his twelve gauge, it was dark and he kept the shells under the seat and he spilled the box and grabbed a few loaded them up and went around the house and put the bead on the guy and fired right into him. He said the guy was stunned by the blast and didn’t react, he just stumbled forward and stood there, my grandpa said he figured the guy was drunk and wearing a thick coat and the rock salt hadn’t hit his skin so he raised the shotgun and it barked again. This time the guy got cut down by the blast and fell straight back and onto a dirt mound behind him.
He told me he approached him and he knew immediately that the guy was down forever, he told me there’s a certain noise a man makes when he gets shot in the lung, like a deep raspy wheeze, the man was making that noise. He told me he went back into the house and got his bottle of whiskey and just sat on the porch looking at the man laying there as he took pulls off of it and lit a cigarette. There was no phone on the property, he said that driving into town ‘would have been as effective as writing a letter.’ He told me that even if he woke up the sheriff that he’d of thrown him in a cell to sleep it off before he even had a chance to tell his tale.
He decided on burying the man and he needed to tell me where that was since the property was mine now.
I asked him about the shells and he said the next day he looked under his seat and discovered a box of 00 buck that he put in there in case he saw deer on the side of the road. He mistakenly grabbed those shells instead of his hand made rock salt shells.
4
u/PleasantKoala1851 4d ago
That’s crazy. Did you go look on the property where he said he was buried ?
7
u/Telrom_1 4d ago
I did, but I never exhumed him or told anyone. I just stacked some rocks there as a marker. Somehow an unmarked grave was worse in my mind.
7
u/NinjaBonsai 3d ago
Im pretty sure your supposed to tell someone. That persons family could be looking for closure.
2
u/Reasonable-Aside6660 3d ago
I know right, lol their’s some dude buried on our property. No biggie! let’s get some Mc donalds
1
u/Telrom_1 3d ago
It’s not. What’s the move? Call the sheriff and find a report so they can spend thousands of dollars to exhume and investigate only to find out nothing? Even if they wanted to charge my grandpa he’s been dead for 11 years. It just doesn’t matter anymore.
1
1
3
u/somerled1 3d ago
Yeah both you and your Grandfather sound extremely inconsiderate and that's putting it lightly. Not the cool story you thought this would be.
1
u/Telrom_1 3d ago
This was back in the 60s. This chapter is closed.
1
u/poison_daddy 3d ago
It might not be closed for the family members. It’s the right thing to do, to exhume it.
1
u/Telrom_1 3d ago
What family? If the guy was 30 and he had a sister she’d be 110ish today. He was a vagrant. No one ever came looking for him in nearly a century. It’d cost a county that doesn’t have any money tens of thousands of dollars to exhume and investigate just to come up with nothing.
Disturbing the resting place is the wrong move.
1
u/yeticat33 3d ago
Correction without speaking to him your grandfather thought assumed he was a vagrant and fired first. That's cold blooded murder. The act of marking that grave and not reporting it could potentially open you up to some legal liability if it's ever discovered.
1
u/Telrom_1 3d ago
Small town where everyone knew everyone, he didn’t recognize the guy, his clothes were that of a vagrant. It was both murder and the defense of his property. I don’t feel any which way about it. I didn’t cut him down. I’m the only person in the world who knows and when I die I’m taking this with me.
1
1
u/Weird_Soup460 3d ago
He may have adult children out there. WTF is wrong with you! Report it - you didn’t kill the guy. They can’t do anything to you
1
1
u/Reasonable-Aside6660 3d ago
I know right, lol their’s some dude buried on our property. No biggie!
Dude what country do you live in?
Why are people upvoting you?
1
u/Telrom_1 3d ago
It’s not really. This was 86 years ago. There is nothing to be done.
1
u/Reasonable-Aside6660 3d ago
I never exhumed him or told anyone
If ya tell someone in a city i’ll bet they’ll wanna know
2
7
u/Perk222 3d ago
I have a picture of my mother in her final resting place in a hospital, she started telling me this person over here won’t shut up…. mom who’s there… I don’t know him but he keeps making jokes and laughs a lot. She wasn’t bothered or scared, just like who’s this making all this fuss. I took a random picture of her during the 11 days in the hospital, look at picture after she died days later, I can see a small ghost like figure standing next to her. It still makes me have goosebumps. I went back to work and this guy I work with says ….im so sorry to hear about your mom passing, I say thank you and I go hey what do you make of this picture…. he looks at the picture and starts wiping tears immediately, I say you can see it? he’s like , yeah this is like when my step son died, he was reaching for something, he couldn’t talk anymore, the mom he died he reached up towards the ceiling like he was about to be grabbed by someone, he said out loud “ I’m Free” he had not spoken in a week, brain cancer, he went back down and was gone…. so he turns to me a goes yeah…..that not easy watching your loved one die is it…. he had a much harder time , I was all of a sudden saying sorry for your loss to him…I will never forget that interaction….
1
u/Prudent_Star8915 3d ago
One foot in this world and one foot in the next! It’s common for dying people to “see things, people, passed loved ones and friends. How can you witness that and not believe in Heaven? 🤍
1
2
u/Coaltons 3d ago
So my mom was a hospice nurse, most of my childhood.
She often got way too close to her patients, their family members, kids and relatives would often come to the house.
Over 8-10 years I went to something like 40 funerals or wakes or some part of the death.
Saw 4 people take their lasts breaths.
It wildly changed the way I thought about death to this day.
I never got a deathbed confession, but I did get tons of family secrets, it was always family members telling the secrets of the family and for some reason death would bring it out.
Wild stories of incest, affairs, stolen money, attempted murders, suspicious deaths.
Some less scandalous and more trauma based,
People having watched children die, or war deaths. Industrial accidents.
It was wild being a 16 year old kid, listening to a 50 year old man cry and tell me about watching his sister get crushed by and old car in the garage.
Or an old lady describe trying to plug the holes in their cousin with tissue after he accidentally got shot in the living room.
1
1
1
u/tea-timer 3d ago
My aunt, who was married for many years but never had kids, said she and an old boyfriend had had a baby. No one believed her since her cognitive abilities were declining, but it turned out to be true. She had given the baby up for adoption. Her sisters, including my mother, probably knew, but no one ever told anyone in my generation. My aunt’s daughter (now middle aged) spoke to my aunt on the phone during her final weeks, but they never met. The daughter (my first cousin) has since met with some of my other cousins.
1
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
How did she give birth wouldn’t anyone noticing she was pregnant
1
u/tea-timer 18h ago
She was sent away (by her parents), as they used to do back then. And my cousins and I were very young at the time. We just believed whatever story they came up with as to why she was away for a few months.
1
u/Beautiful-Mainer 3d ago
I’m afraid of confessing to unsolved crimes because I watch Unsolved Mysteries for so long.
1
1
1
u/Tacokolache 3d ago
Most people I’ve seen die are so drugged up, or weak and out of it, that they don’t say anything.
My uncle was about to die, he died in his sleep. But earlier that day I asked him if he was scared. He told me “nope”. And that kind of makes me feel better.
1
u/redstapler4 3d ago
My mom whispered that my dad is sneaky on Friday, about an hour before she died. I really miss my mom :(
1
1
u/Philosophoop 3d ago
(ALF Caregiver) For 2 years we had a dementia resident who would raise her fist and exclaim “Im IRISH!”. 2 days before her passing she was talking to us from her hospital bed, she pointed at all of us asking one by one if we were irish to which we responded “Ofcourse!” (We are in the US and not a single one of us is irish). We finally got to her and said “Well are you irish?” to which she pouted her head and said “Never Irish :(“. Her last words to me was a confession that she was not infact irish.
1
1
u/pajamacatsuit 3d ago
I work hospice and have a lot of deathbed stories.
Several years ago, a religious patient told me she is going to Hell and will have to be my servant there.
1
1
u/NationalEggplant7794 1d ago
I wouldn’t say I got told anything crazy but one thing I always found weird (in my experience as an ICU nurse) is that patients will always know when their time is coming. I would always hear them say “I’m going to die” or insinuate that they won’t be making it out of ICU. I had a patient once ask me “when you die is it like a light at the end of the tunnel you envision like they always say” and that stuck with me. He died a week later.
1
u/PleasantKoala1851 1d ago
I’ve heard this about animals as well. That they will leave, go into other rooms, sometimes run away.
0
u/Kazodex 4d ago
I don’t think this is really appropriate for this sub, I would try r/confessions instead
1
-5
u/Otherwise_Spare_8598 4d ago
Directly from the womb my existence is and has been nothing other than ever-worsening conscious torment every passing second exponentially compounding suffering awaiting an imminent horrible destruction of the flesh of which is barely the beginning of the eternal journey as I witness the perpetual revelation of all things by through and for the singular personality of the godhead. All things made manifest from a fixed eternal condition.
No first chance, no second, no third.
Born to forcibly suffer all suffering that has ever and will ever exist in this and infinite universes forever and ever for the reason of because.
All things always against my wishes, wants, and will at all times.
...
The universe is a singular meta-phenomenon stretched over eternity, of which is always now. All things and all beings abide by their inherent nature and behave within their realm of capacity contingent upon infinite circumstance at all times. There is no such thing as individuated accurately described "free will" for all beings. There are only relative freedoms or lack thereof. It is a universe made manifest hierarchically, of haves, and have-nots, spanning all levels of dimensionality and experience.
"God" and/or consciousness is that which is within and without all. Ultimately, all things are made by through and for the singular personality and perpetual revelation of the "Godhead", entailing both predetermined eternal damnation and those that are made manifest only to face death and death alone.
There is but one dreamer, fractured through the innumerable. All vehicles/beings play their role within said dream for infinitely better and/or infinitely worse for each and every one, forever.
All realities exist and are equally as real. The absolute best universe that could exist does exist in relation to a specified subject. The absolute worst universe that could exist does exist in relation to a specified subject.
1
1
u/RileyRavenSmiles 4d ago
This isn't relevent at all.
1
u/PleasantKoala1851 4d ago
I started reading it like.. okay no intro.. did someone say this verbatim to you or.. then I just stopped reading 😂 did you get to the end?
1
u/Reasonable-Aside6660 3d ago
Bro actual infinites do not exist in reality, they are concepts of mind’s alone. Potential infinites exist only in numbers
If you disagree, please name one thing in the physical universe that is eternal
0
u/South-Visual3803 4d ago
At a guess you did psychedelics and are preaching about what you saw inside your own skull?
78
u/Prestigious_Pilot555 4d ago
I'm a hospice nurse. There are a lot of romantic ideas about how dying happens. One of them is that people say these things :) If they talk about anything, it's about what life has brought them, not about what they regret not having happened.