Comment by hugh3
15 years ago
This brings up an interesting point: should we trust people about their deathbed regrets?
I mean, let's face it. You're lying there, surrounded by your relatives, and everybody is sad. You're going to want to say something life-affirming about how you wish you'd spent more time with your children or smelled more flowers or listened to the wind blowing through the trees or something like that... something that sounds appropriate for the situation, and something that people will think well of you for.
You don't want to say "I wish I'd married a different woman" or "I should have stopped after my first two children" or "If only I'd gone to law school", even if those are your deepest regrets. There's a certain amount of social pressure to only talk about pleasant life-affirming things, so that's pretty much what you're going to get.
On the other hand, if someone has been lying all their life, if they're ever going to tell the truth, it's going to be on their deathbed.
This idea actually appears in our legal system: in court, hearsay (Person X testifies that they heard Person Y say something about Event Z) is usually rejected because there's no way of knowing whether Person Y was lying, even if Person X was truthful. But there are exceptions for circumstances under which Person Y is considered likely to be telling the truth. One of them is a dying declaration; statements made on a deathbed.