Quotes About Support

At times, they made her wonder if she had the right doctors

The effort and expense it took to keep him going were enormous

This simple but profound service—to grasp a fading man's need for everyday comforts, for companionship, for help achieving his modest aims—is the thing that is still so devastatingly lacking more than a century later.

they provided assisted living, but no one seemed to think it was their job to actually assist him with living

The burdens for today's caregiver have actually increased from what they would have been a century ago.

According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don't want if that is what their loved ones want. The

medically dominated culture of care for the elderly.

And the insight was that as people's capacities wane, whether through age or ill health, making their lives better often requires curbing our purely medical imperatives—resisting the urge to fiddle and fix and control. It was not hard to see how important this idea could be for the patients I encountered in my daily practice—people facing mortal circumstances at every phase of life.

and I called him to see how he was doing.

Dressing somebody is easier than letting them dress themselves. It takes less time. It's less aggravation. So unless supporting people's capabilities is made a priority, the staff ends up dressing people like they're rag dolls. Gradually, that's how everything begins to go. The tasks come to matter more than the people.

The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of diseases as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.

At Neff's suggestion, Goodman

and led her out of the room.

called him at home to hear how he had weathered the aftermath.

In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.

I had given her the facts. But by including the fact that I was worried, I'd not only told her about the seriousness of the situation, I'd told her that I was on her side—I was pulling for her. The words also told her that, although I feared something serious, there remained uncertainties—possibilities for hope within the parameters nature had imposed.

Other shoes aren't as comfortable

We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Despair and isolation are my greatest internal enemies. I need to remember I am not alone, even when it feels that way. Now more than ever it is time to put my solitary ways behind me, even while protecting my solitude.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.

But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange.

And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.