Inspired by having just read about this guy, but not specific to those details.
Essentially, suppose you had some deep dark secret that you had successfully kept for decades. Now you’re dying. Do you have some burning desire to “confess” this before you die? Or do you feel no such compunction?
Obviously, whatever compunction you do feel would be balanced against your concerns about your legacy. So I imagine if someone had led a respectable life for decades but was in his youth a serial killer/child molestor/necrophiliac, he might supress that urge. But the question is more about the extent to which the urge exists altogether.
I can’t see myself being so deprived of character that I’d have anything worth waiting until checkout time to admit to. But there is a chaotic side to me that might be tempted to spin one last yarn, just for old time’s sake. And then do the old "And the person who can back all this up is…is…is…fake dying noises "
I can see why someone would do it, but I doubt very many people do unless they have some deep dark secret that if revealed would alter someone’s life either for the better or the worse.
A deathbed confession could involve a bag of buried money, or perhaps they were the witness to an unsolved murder but were too afraid to speak about it at the time. I think they’re much more common in TV murder mysteries than in real life.
One of my college housemates spent part of his childhood as an embassy brat in the 70s and 80s. His father was a high level diplomat but not an ambassador. I jokingly told my friend that his father was probably actually a spy and the diplomat thing was a cover. It was a running joke between us for many years. On the few occasions that I met his parents, we would jokingly confront them and try to get them to admit that there was clandestine stuff that went on back in the day.
It eventually came to pass that his father was in hospice and my friend went to visit him near the end. By now you have probably guessed that his dad admitted that he really did occasionally work as a spy.
As for me, I am pretty much an open book but there are a few things that I will take to my grave. No way I am confessing to anything.
Death is hard enough on a family. Why would a person try to settle old scores, inject new problems into your personal relationship, you are going to pass on soon and they will be left with all the detritus you leave behind?
Let it all go, you are dead soon, and by being now dead you are leaving issues that you do not have to take care of, but they do. It is narcissic to imagine that you will be important much longer and your are being selfish.
All debts are paid, the ship has sailed. They will get by somehow without you. Don’t leave them one more problem, I’m sure they have had enough to deal with.
Well, to some extent, everyone in the Foreign Service is a spy at some level. You’re expected to report anything you might see or hear, or any contacts that are made by foreign nationals outside of normal business. My family was convinced that I was in the CIA, regardless of me telling them repeatedly that I was a facilities manager. They got that notion because of people coming to their doors for the background check for my security clearance.
Fair enough. They were in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion. He would drive out to the middle of nowhere to meet with people and sometimes deliver or receive packages.
For the person mentioned by the OP, the family would have had issues anyway, because the cops tracked down his assumed identity. It is a kindness for the family to hear the story from the perpetrator, rather than just have the cops show up out of the blue and start asking bizarre and embarrassing questions.
I don’t have a sense that deathbed confessions actually take place with any frequency in real life. It seems more like the plot device of fictional writers. Years ago I heard a speaker mention that he interviewed 150 men in jail, and almost every single one of them thought they didn’t belong there, that they didn’t do anything wrong. He pointed out that certainly some might be innocent, but not all of them. I mention this because people who do bad things have a way of rationalizing what they did and in their own way have come to terms with it. So in their minds they have nothing to make a confession about, and if anything they see themselves as the victim of others.
I have so little to confess about the things I have done. I’m not sure I could come up with anything I haven’t already told somebody.
The things I think and feel, though – some of those are secrets, maybe even deep and dark secrets. Confessing those wouldn’t make me feel any better, it’d make me feel worse for burdening those around me.
The fear I have about all this is that I might lose control of what I express. Sometimes people near the end babble all sorts of awful things. Their inhibitions, their internal editor, fail them. This would be a shame.
When Ms. Napier’s father died and we cleared out his house for sale, stacks of pornography in the basement came to light, and it forever tarnished the way she thought about him (which wasn’t so great to begin with). That’s the kind of feeling I would want to avoid. I don’t have any stacks of pornography, but all the same I don’t want to start blabbing the thoughts and feelings that are better kept inside.
I might say “The key…to the room…where the money is…can be found in…(gasp)”.*
A word to the wise - do not trust “deathbed confessions”. There’s no good reason to trust their sincerity and accuracy. When you’re on the verge of croaking, who knows what will come out? Morever, people make them up, as in the case of Louis Pasteur, claimed by the woo crowd to have refuted germ theory on his deathbed. Pasteur supposedly “admitted”, “Bernard was right: the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything.”
No, there’s no evidence he said any such thing.
*a The Twelve Chairs reference.
**Dutch Schultz’s last words as he lay dying of gunshot wounds included "A boy has never wept…nor dashed a thousand kin.” “You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.” But where are the bodies buried, Dutch? “Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy.”
Note, however, that “dying declarations” are a common law exception to hearsay restrictions, based on the notion that they are more reliable. Dying declaration - Wikipedia
