IN 2016 The Economist and the Kaiser Family Foundation, an American non-profit focused on health care, polled people in America, Brazil, Italy and Japan about their hopes and worries for their end-of-life wishes.

We found that what is most important to people at the end depends on where they live. In America and Japan not burdening families with the costs of care was the highest-ranked priority. (The Japanese may be worrying about the cost of funerals, which can easily reach ¥3m, or $24,000; Americans may be worrying about medical bills, which can be ruinous.) In Brazil, where Catholicism prevails, the leading priority was being at peace spiritually. What Italians wanted most at the end was to have their loved ones around them. Doctors’ efforts to extend life near its end may not always be aligned with their patients' priorities: living as long as possible was deemed least important of the seven things that we asked about, except in Brazil where it tied with not burdening relatives financially.

The majority of people in each country had given “some” or “a great deal” of thought to their wishes for medical treatment in case of serious illness. But having spoken with their families about the subject was much less common, and putting wishes down in writing even rarer. Americans were most likely to have planned ahead: 56% had spoken with a loved one about the medical treatment they want if they were to become seriously ill; 27% had put their wishes in a written document. The Japanese were the most likely to have avoided the subject, even though Japan has the world’s oldest population. Less than a third had told their families about their wishes in case of serious illness and only 6% had put those wishes in writing.

In all four countries we polled, there was a huge discrepancy between what people wanted and what they expected to happen to them at the end. Majorities in each said that if they could choose where to die, they would die at home. Americans felt that particularly strongly, with nearly two-thirds preferring to die at home. In each of the four countries, however, the share who thought they were most likely to die at home fell about 30 percentage points short of the share who hoped to. By contrast, expecting to die in hospital was far more common than wishing to die there.

Around the world, the taboo on talking about death is starting to fade. Over time, that should help narrow the gap between what people want for their deaths, and what they are likely to get. As our editorial argues, though death is inevitable, a bad death is not.

The full results from the survey are published here.