Quotes About End-of-life

How does a doctor tell you that it's over, that there are things they could do but probably shouldn't, and that if your aim is quality of life and not quantity of life, there simply are no good next treatments?

And more than anything, we are a pretty awkward society when it comes to talking about dying. It's supposed to happen offstage, in hospitals, and no one wants to dwell on it too much.

I guess we're all in it together," she said. And I couldn't help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one. I

It is significant that the major world religions having studied the problem of unrelieved suffering for over 2000 years, have independently concluded that there is no justification for euthanasia or PAS. There

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.

I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.

GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.

My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.

And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.

For example, the bulk of federal Medicare insurance for the elderly is spent keeping people alive in their last six months, trying to prevent what cannot be prevented. That many recipients of this intervention do not judge the quality of their life in those last months to be satisfactory is a dilemma for which we have no solution.

In my own way, I too was unable to execute his wishes. He'd begged me before I left that afternoon when he'd tried to go home to stay away from the hospital, now that it was just a matter of time. But I couldn't, and toward the end I saw in his eyes each time that I appeared beside his bed that he was glad to see me, and scared as hell of dying alone. Which he ended up doing anyway. The

Among the Yuit Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, if an individual requested suicide three times, relatives were obligated to assist in the killing. The person seeking suicide dressed in ritual death garb and then was killed in a "destroying place" set aside specifically for that purpose. To save commonly held resources of food or to allow a nomadic society to move on unhindered by the physically ill or elderly, some societies gave tacit if not explicit approval to suicide.

The vet, a fiercely caring professional, told them the horse was dying. Knowing her duty, she said: "I want to euthanize it.

Seniors in turn don't benefit from our ability to help them with their end-of-life tasks. They become developmental orphans, and their search for legacy, which must be helped along by caring younger adults, doesn't take place.

One day, Lisa Capaldini, a young intern in the AIDS ward, was saying good-bye to a patient named Gordon with whom she had grown close. Gordon was about to be discharged, but he was blind and dying, and Capaldini knew that she would never see him again. While she hovered over his bed, the intern began to cry. "And I thought, 'That's okay, he won't know.' Then I realized that my tears were dropping on his face. And I thought, 'Busted.

People with deep faith and big hearts are concerned, as I am about the circumstance that Ms. Schiavo is in. I want them to know I will do what I can, but there are limits to what any particular person - irrespective of the title they currently hold - can do.

Mis pacientes moribundos me enseñaron mucho más que lo que es morirse. Me dieron lecciones sobre lo que podrían haber hecho, lo que deberían haber hecho y lo que no hicieron hasta cuando fue demasiado tarde, hasta que estaban demasiado enfermos o débiles, hasta que ya eran viudos o viudas. Contemplaban su vida pasada y me enseñaban las cosas que tenían verdadero sentido, no sobre cómo morir, sino sobre cómo vivir.

Si uno se toma el tiempo de sentarse junto a la cabecera de la cama de los moribundos, ellos son los que nos informan sobre las etapas del morir.

I say to people who care for people who are dying, if you really love that person and want to help them, be with them when their end comes close. Sit with them - you don't even have to talk. You don't have to do anything but really be there with them.

The Society for Creative Euthanasia

I think death has a right to its own courage and dignity and self-respect.

Peaceful death is really an essential human right," he writes, "more essential perhaps even than the right to vote or the right to justice; it is a right on which, all religious traditions tell us, a great deal depends for the well-being and spiritual future of the dying person.… There is no greater gift of charity you can give than helping a person to die well.

Doctors and nurses are people who give you medicine until you die.

There is a growing moral view that patients should take charge of their own ends now that more sophisticated means of suicide – as described in this book – are available.