Quotes About Acceptance

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses.

created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die. *

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently. We do not like to think about this eventuality. As a result, most of us are unprepared for it. We rarely pay more than glancing attention to how we will live when we need help until it's too late to do much about it.

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped.

I was impressed that he had learned to tolerate the winters.

Alice insisted the accelerator had got stuck. She thought of herself as a good driver and hated the idea that anyone would think that the problem was her age. The body's decline creeps like a vine. Day to day, the changes can be imperceptible. You adapt. Then something happens that finally makes it clear that things are no longer the same. The falls didn't do it. The car accident didn't do it. Instead, it was a scam that did. Not long after the car accident, Alice

If offered the option to have someone more experienced, I certainly would have taken it. But that was simply how the system worked—no such choices were offered—and so I went along. What else could I do?

Goodman insisted there was nothing to be done.

Serious illness or infirmity will strike. It is as inevitable as sunset. And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the

This place where half of us will typically spend a year or more of our lives was never truly made for us.

As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses." Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

There's no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born. One may even come to understand and accept this fact.

The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. *

asked Thomas what his special technique for sales was as a kid. He said he didn't have any. It was simply that "I was willing to be rejected. That's what allows you to be a good salesperson. You have to be willing to be rejected.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

The necessity of nature's final victory was expected and accepted in generations before our own. Doctors were far more willing to recognize the signs of defeat and far less arrogant about denying them.

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.

If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

It requires vigilance over nutrition, medications, and living situations. And it requires each of us to contemplate the unfixable in our life, the decline we will unavoidably face, in order to make the small changes necessary to reshape it. When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrics uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not.

We are all, whatever we do, in the hands of flawed human beings.

When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician's uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not. *

Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

accepted stoically, without fear or self-pity or hope for anything