Three years ago, a palliative nurse made a list of the most common regrets of the dying which was widely circulated around the Internet. At the top of her list was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Time and time again, the nurse saw her patients haunted by the wishes they never pursued. They kicked their dreams down the road until, eventually, they were left for another life unlikely to come.
This week, an obituary of a man from Maine is going viral because not only did he chase his dreams, but women and a good buzz until he took his last breath. “Irishman Dies of Stubbornness, Whisky” is the title of Chris Connors’ obituary and whoever wrote it had an amazing sense of humor and incredible love for their friend. Connors’ obituary tells the tale of a man who “wrote his own rules, fought authority and paved his own way. And if you said he couldn’t do it, he would make sure he could.”
Here’s an excerpt:
Most people thought he was crazy for swimming in the ocean in January; for being a skinny Irish Golden Gloves boxer from Quincy, Massachusetts; for dressing up as a priest and then proceeding to get into a fight at a Jewish deli. Many gawked at his start of a career on Wall Street without a financial background - but instead with an intelligent, impish smile, love for the spoken word, irreverent sense of humor, and stunning blue eyes that could make anyone fall in love with him.
As much as people knew hanging out with him would end in a night in jail or a killer screwdriver hangover, he was the type of man that people would drive 16 hours at the drop of a dime to come see. He lived 1000 years in the 67 calendar years we had with him because he attacked life; he grabbed it by the lapels, kissed it, and swung it back onto the dance floor. At the age of 26 he planned to circumnavigate the world - instead, he ended up spending 40 hours on a life raft off the coast of Panama. In 1974, he founded the Quincy Rugby Club. In his thirties, he sustained a knife wound after saving a woman from being mugged in New York City. He didn’t slow down: at age 64, he climbed to the base camp of Mount Everest. Throughout his life, he was an accomplished hunter and birth control device tester (with some failures, notably Caitlin Connors, 33; Chris Connors, 11; and Liam Connors, 8).
You can read Connors’ entire obituary at Legacy.com.