30 Unsettling Deathbed Confessions From Those Who Knew Their Time Was Up

I don’t know if this fits in here, but the first death I witnessed was in a dementia ward. The patient has been sad and depressed as long as I’d known her. No matter what we did to cheer her up, it just didn’t stick. One morning I went in to her room to get her out of bed and make her ready for the day, she sat up in her bed with her feet straight out. She somehow looked like a little child and she was smiling. Delighted that she looked happy I exclaimed : «Are you already up, friend?»
She answered, so happy and so smiley: «yes, I’m going home today»

I took her to the bathroom and right there in my arms she went home…

I was young and it scared me back then, but now I cherish that memory. We should all be so lucky to leave the world happy and content.

Brought a pediatric patient back for emergency heart surgery (about 14yrs old). He was very nervous. Outlook looked grim. I held his hand as they began to induce anesthesia. He looked like he was about to cry. I told him there was nothing to worry about. He was gonna be just fine. He gripped my hand super tight as the propfol took hold, looked me in the eye and said "I'm going to die, aren't I?". I told him I would be there in PACU when he woke up. He died on the table. I was the last thing he ever saw. 8 years later I still think about that kid. I still see his face. The fear in his eyes. I still feel guilty that I lied right to his face...

EDIT: Didn't expect this to get as much traction as it did, so I will clarify. I am in a much better place now. I'm still in pediatrics but I have regular therapy and am in a strong place mentally. I appreciate all the kind words. The guilt I feel doesn't weigh on me like it did all those years ago thankfully. Hug your kids and tell them you love them. ✌️.

Lots from COVID that stuck with me. ICU nurse here.

Many passed due to vaccine misinformation. Can think of patients tell me that they wanted the vaccine after they were so sick.

I remember one in particular- his wife recently passed from COVID, and wanted to watch her funeral but had no way of watching it. He was an elderly man without much technological experience. I was able to pull up the live stream using my phone and let him watch. After the funeral was over, he called me in the room to tell me he was ready to pass. He was extremely sick, but still conscious, and wanted all oxygen and meds to be turned off. We gave him morphine and versed and he passed in less than ten mins.

I frequently flashback to all the patients that we gave iPads to so they could FaceTime their family one last time before being intubated (a death sentence). Some patients would get to that point at 2am, and they would call their families multiple times without anyone picking up. Still breaks my heart.

Also had patient who was close to discharging, tell me about dreams they had where the reaper was following them everywhere they went. While waiting for his ride to come pick him up, he went into cardiac arrest and we never got him back.

This isn’t a confession per se, but the eeriest story I’ve ever encountered.

We had a patient in the icu for months, sick with liver failure, perforated bowels, CRRT.. the works. He was so yellow (from the liver failure) he almost looked like he was glowing. He eventually went into cardiac arrest and passed away, sent him to the morgue and clean the room. A few hours later we admit an elderly confused man with dementia for a fall. I’m moving him over to his bed and the first thing he asks is “why is there a yellow man standing in the corner of my room?!”

I was shaking.

I had a patient tell me she had m*rdered her first husband back in the UK in the 1940's.

He was an abusive drunk who married her at 16 when he was 40. He beat her black and blue and often fell asleep drunk afterwards.

She said she poisoned him and no one looked into it after he died, just assumed it was the alcohol. She felt it was her only way out as she had no family or friends and she was scared he would k*ll her if she tried to leave.

She moved to Australia straight after and never told a soul, not her second husband nor her children. She lived a lovely life in New Zealand with a husband, several children and a tribe of grandchildren who all loved her but never knew.

I had an elderly lady in for shortness of breath, she was a very petite but otherwise healthy 90 year old lived independently at home. She had been with us for about 5 hours at this point, she's ready for imaging so the husband goes to get her an overnight bag and we head to imaging.

Fully lucid, stable BP, sinus rhythm, 99% sats on room air asks me to tell her husband when he came back that she loves him very much and has enjoyed her life with him. 15 minutes later we return to the room, I plug her monitor back into the podium and she arrests.

She didn't get to tell him she loved him that one last time like I reassured her she would. I often think about that man, I think he would have shortly passed from a broken heart. The way he looked at her after 70+ years of marriage.


I thought I'd add another "true love" death story. An elderly lady again in her 90s collapsed in the shower at home. She was the carer for her husband who had mild dementia. Her husband heard her fall, found her unconscious and called the ambulance. She arrived lights and sirens with a GCS of 6 (not awake, doesn't respond to verbal commands but has a reflex response to pain). As she was being removed from the back of the ambulance, a colleague was assisting the husband out of the front of the ambulance. As he was exciting the ambulance he had lost his footing, fell down, hit his head and was also now unconcious. They both had catastrophic brain bleeds, were palliated in a bariatric bed together and they both passed away within hours of each other, none the wiser that poor health had impacted them and they never had to go through the pain of losing their life partner.

I often think about their children and hope they can see the beauty in their passing amongst the grief.

Not a nurse and not a confession as such.

My mother was dealing with high blood pressure, increased glucose levels, hyperacidity, cold, and body pains. It all happened in 1.5 days so we never could see it coming, which is why we never took her to the hospital and she was resting at home.

The cold meant she had a stuffy nose hence she was breathing through her mouth and the body pains meant she couldn't lay still on the bed for any longer than 2 mins. Throughout (what were) the last 4 hours of her life, she was just breathing through her mouth, and getting up to sit upright (because of the back aches from lying down + body pains) and then lying down again (because of no energy in the body from a poor appetite across the day) repeatedly.

In the last 30 mins, she sat upright, dragged herself to the edge of the bed to fall on the floor in a sitting position, and crawled her way across to me where I was sitting on a couch, so I could stay up all night vigilant to her needs. She placed her hands/palms, one over the other, on my thigh and then laid her head on this new makeshift pillow she made for herself, where she slept uninterrupted or without much discomfort for 20 mins - it was the longest duration she managed to sleep across the entire day despite being on bed rest. I made it a point not to move an inch, until a mosquito bit me on the foot and forced an intervention which disrupted her sleep.

It would turn out that her last ever nap was spent in her son's lap in a somewhat spine-chilling full circle of life. It was quite difficult to see the guiding light of my life leave like that but thanks to the wonderful people around me, I've looked at that experience from a perspective of her seeking comfort in those moments of pain from someone she loved so unconditionally and that it is truly a privilege being able to give my mother that comfort before she left.

I've got several, but this is one of my favorites. 98 yrs old guy heart failure. Decided to go comfort care only. He was on a lot of meds to keep him comfortable until his room was ready. I was 1:1 with him in the ED. Basically keeping him well so he could pass in peace when his family and friends arrived. I asked him " so, 98 yrs. What have you learned?" His response was awesome. He said "sex. If I knew the last time I had it was going to be the last time, I would not have been such a gentleman." I don't know why, but in his halting gasps it always makes me laugh. Approach everything with gusto ladies and gentlemen, like it might be your last time.

Patient once told me he wished he had worked less and spent more time traveling and being with friends and family. He died the next day, not on my shift. It stuck in my head. A few years later I retired and this was one of the reasons. It changed my perspective.

I've had a few people casually tell me, "I'm going to die today." The first time someone who was awake, alert and not-in-distress told me that (then died later that day), I was spooked. Then, I learned to believe them.

Not a nurse but I had a lovely conversation with the nurse who cared for my grandma when she died. She did the whole "idk how to say this but one of the last things she said seemed like she k*lled her husband?" And I just laughed and went "yea, two of them. Times were crazy before no fault divorce." It was always an open, but not talked about, secret. Now that she's dead and can't be arrested, I'm bragging to *everyone* about how protective she was towards "kids in her care". She was a flawed human being but she was fiercely protective and the strongest person I've ever met.

He didn’t die, BUT… had a patient come into the ER who had a partial airway obstruction. He thought he was a goner. He told his wife on the way in that he’d been having a decades-long affair.

Annnnd of course he ended up being okay. The wife left his room and did NOT come back.

I wasn’t a nurse but a CNA.. working in dementia care I was helping a resident with a bath having a typical conversation with him about his day, my day, etc. For his dementia, it was considered a “great” day. Near the end he thanked me [my name] for the help but then he quickly grabbed my hand saying “Thank you for being here [daughters name]”, she hadn’t visited him in a long time

He dozed off as I was cleaning up supplies and when patted his hand as a goodbye gesture not to wake him, I realized he had passed.

I was 16, it really shaped my perception of both death and love

Edit to change typo.

An old lady told me she had a 22 year long affair with a bus driver, and all five of her adult children might be his.

I didn't pass that along.

Had a patient that was a Covid/Vax denier despite being in an ICU with COVID. His last words were, "I didn't think it was real".

A grumpy, nasty old gentlemen who had an acute deterioration in his COPD and opted for palliative care. We called and called his next of kin to come in and say goodbye but they either didn’t answer or one of them even said “don’t call us back until he’s gone”. He managed to tell us it was because he had married a young Thai bride and had changed his will to leave everything to her but even they had separated and she didn’t want to see him. He had alienated all of his children and had never even met or tried to meet his grandchildren.
Another nurse and I still held his hands, told him it was okay, and played calming music for over an hour while he passed. And afterwards we cried for him and treated his body with the utmost respect as we prepared him for the morgue. No one deserves to die alone and I will never feel bad for showing s**t people kindness. And I think that’s part of why I like being a nurse.

Two come to mind, a mother and son were cooking m*th and the house exploded. They both had enough burns they were not going to make it. They basically just held hands and apologized to each other and died together. They were both comfort care on our unit.

The other was a young man with AIDS that didn’t believe in treatment. He said he hopes on his next reincarnation he takes better care of himself and that he wished he would have taken the meds.

I'm a nursing assistant and definitely have some stories.

I've had a few senior women who are in different stages of dementia describe violent SA they experienced as children, many of the stories were similar in the sense of when they told their parents they were blamed or not taken seriously. Really heart breaking but I never knew if they were actually true stories.

I once had a man who was extremely sick, confused and at the end stages of life. I had only dealt with him on 2 separate occasions a few days apart so wasn't super familiar with him. He confessed on both occasions to beating a woman to death in great detail. The when, the where and the why. I reported it but never heard anything back. None of the staff that had worked with him previously had heard this, one nurse told me someone had mentioned he may have vaguely mentioned something about it but didn't know the details. Also not sure if it was the confusion or true, but the amount of details he had and the way he said he was ready to be put away for it was really disturbing.

On the opposite side here: I've died clinically once (though thankfully I was resuscitated).

I grew up in the slums of Rio. It was extremely violent and the only way to avoid being part of the d**g cartel and not having protection to survive was to be part of a gang. I was part of a gang made only of girls. At the time, the average life expectancy of us there was 23.

When I was 15, I got stabbed in the guts and went down the Dona Marta, which is a very steep way down, to the public hospital at the base. I got there, and I was 200% sure I was gonna die of blood loss.

My last words to the nurse before I passed out were "Will you tell my friends I was brave?" I wasn't thinking of my parents or my family. I was worried for the other girls.

It seems... extremely sophomoric now, but it meant a lot back then. In a way, reputation was everything, and I didn't want other gang members to think less of my friends if I died scared.

I’m a hospice nurse. Not as many deathbed confessions because folks usually aren’t lucid/talking at end of life.

Lots of people will have terminal lucidity and say that they’re going to die (or if they have dementia, they might say a bus is coming to get them, or they are going on a trip).

But the big moment-of-death thing that stuck with me was a woman who, literally right before her last breath, opened her eyes, stared at something we couldn’t see, let out a gut-wrenching cry/wail, then died. It really kind of chilled me. I told her family it wasn’t uncommon to have some final burst of energy (true), but didn’t tell them I’d never seen it present like that. Usually it’s just a sigh or a teardrop. Not a f*****g scream.

This doesn’t quite fit as I’m not a nurse, BUT.

Last year my great grandfather passed, I live 4hrs away from my family, my mom gave me a call shortly before his passing to come visit because “it will be the last time I’d see him” (in his late 90’s on hospice, not doing well)

Well, after I’d visited and come home, I get a FaceTime from my mom (she stayed with him along with her mom in his final days). The reason she FaceTimed me was because my great grandpa kept asking for me and saying he needed me. When she put me on the phone with him, all he wanted to ask me was if it is okay that he “moves on to the other side” I assured him that it was okay and no one would be mad at him.

Afterward, my mom told me that he had said I came to him in his sleep last night to help him to the other side and he wanted to talk to me to make sure it was okay to go.

Sure enough he passed that night. I think about it sometimes, an odd feeling that I, for some reason was what helped him let go.