Quotes About Death

If anything, she possessed him in death in a way that she never had while he was alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely, hers.

be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.

Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living. Graveyards sprang up in parks and meadows, by streams and rivers, in fields and forest glades. Tombstones grew out of the ground like young children's teeth. Every village, every locality, had its own graveyard.

What bloody man is that, sir?" I tossed the paper in the grate, though there was no fire on this warm summer day. "Bartholomew, you are quoting from Macbeth, did you know? King Duncan in the first scene, which is ominous. He died rather horribly soon after.

The end was nigh. She had been waiting for her father to die so her life could begin, but as we could all have told her it doesn't work like that. She knew that anyway. Really.

Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.

People die only once. They have no experience to draw on.

Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well.

But death is not a subject that his doctors, friends, or family can countenance. That is what causes him his most profound pain.

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don't, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not.

Medical care is about our life and death, and we've always needed doctors to help us understand what is happening and why, and what is possible and what is not. In the increasingly tangled web of experts and expert systems, a doctor has an even greater obligation to serve as a knowledgeable guide and

All the same I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about the abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them.

As recently as 1945, most deaths occurred in the home. By the 1980s, just 17 percent did.

the pattern alone indicated that the manner of death was homicide.

Four minutes without oxygen would lead to permanent brain damage, if not death.

DECLINE REMAINS OUR fate; death will someday come.

As Montaigne wrote, observing late-sixteenth-century life, "To die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death, and so much less natural than others: it is the last and extremest kind of dying.

Medicine and public health have transformed the trajectory of our lives. For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once.

an average of $94,000 during the last year of life with a metastatic breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with $12,000-a-month chemotherapy, $4,000-a-day intensive care, $7,000-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and few are good at knowing when to stop.

A large part of the task is helping people negotiate the overwhelming anxiety—anxiety about death, anxiety about suffering, anxiety about loved ones, anxiety about finances," she explained. "There are many worries and real terrors." No one conversation can address them all. Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany.

The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill.

By this point, Sara had undergone three rounds of chemotherapy with limited, if any, effect. Perhaps Marcoux could have discussed what she most wanted as death neared and how best to achieve those wishes.