Quotes from Ira Byock

The healthiest response to death is to love, honor, and celebrate life.

Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.

some accuse hospice and palliative care clinicians of promoting a "culture of death" when we allow dying people to leave this life gently, without subjecting them to CPR or mechanical ventilation or dialysis or medical nutrition.

even a person who decides to forgo treatment does not necessarily choose death. Rather, he chooses life without the burden of disproportionate medical intervention.

Often when a physician cannot imagine what else to do for someone who is feeling helpless and hopeless—for whom life has no value—I find that love is the answer.

Even at the very end of life, healing a relationship can transform the history of a family. A relationship that is complete need not end; in this context, complete means there is nothing left unsaid or undone. When a dying person and a loved one come to feel complete between themselves, time together tends to be as full of joy and loving affection as sadness.

Sometimes God Calms the Storm…Sometimes He Lets the Storm Rage and Calms His Child.

Some people conflate forgiveness with absolution

We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.

In living with, rather than relentlessly fighting their cancer, they ultimately live longer.

for what it is worth, when people have been fighting cancer for a long time, as you have, there often comes a point at which they may live longer if they decide to live with their cancer rather than continue to fight against their cancer.

Dying is the most universal and arguably most difficult of life events. Pretty much by definition, dying people are as sick as they have ever been.

More than 80 percent of participants at these community forums indicated it was very important or extremely important to have their dignity respected, preferences honored, pain controlled, and not to leave family with debt.

The large majority wanted to be at home at the end of life, only 1 percent said they would prefer being in a hospital, and not a single participant wanted to be in a nursing home at the end of life.

In managing pain, I teach patients a 0-to-10 scale so they can rate and record pain at different times of day, with various activities, and in response to medications and other treatments. And I review with people common descriptors of different types of pain—dull, achy, sharp, stabbing, cramping, tearing or burning, shooting, tingling, and pins and needles—that provide information to doctors about possible causes and specific treatments.

TAKING THE LONG VIEW, we are still a young civilization and our culture is a work in progress. In our policies, programs, and plans for caring for people through the end of life, we have been acting childishly: ignoring basic responsibilities, indulging in magical thinking (If we ignore it, maybe it will go away), and fighting without regard to the consequences.

After his liver transplant in April 2009, visionary Apple CEO Steve Jobs lived two and a half years

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

To fully and authentically affirm life, we must affirm all of life, including dying, death, and grief.

People are inherently dignified, and they are only made undignified if they are placed in situations that are demeaning.

month after Jeanne died, Michelle received a bill for her mother's twenty-three-hour hospitalization. It totaled $22,402. (Adjusted for inflation, the amount would exceed $27,000 in 2012.) The bill included $6,750 for twenty-two separate blood tests, $1,077 for three electrocardiograms, $4,187 for a CAT scan of her head, $776 for three X-rays of her abdomen, $296 for a chest X-ray, and $3,246 for three ultrasound tests.

Medicare would not pay for more basic "life support," such as someone to help Mr. St. Pierre to get up and dressed each day, to bathe him a few times a week, or to prepare his meals. These things were not health care, and Medicare and insurance guidelines make clear that only health care is covered.

A good working relationship with the doctor and health care team of the person being cared for is probably the single most important thing that caregivers need.

The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits, sociologist John McKnight