Quotes About End-of-life

As a matter of fact, one of the things in Obamacare is that for the elderly, every five years you must have end-of-life counseling. Translation: suicide counseling.

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.

We should all expect to be able to die with comfort, dignity and love. Our society does not lack the wealth to realise this aspiration, but the willpower.

You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family.

I heard a doctor say that the living tend to withdraw emotionally from the dying, thereby driving them deeper into isolation. Not to withdraw takes tremendous strength. To pull back is a temptation; it doesn't hurt nearly as much as remaining open.

Attempting to grapple with improving end-of-life care is a political third rail.

She didn't leave any written instructions. She has verbally expressed her wishes to me and other people.

Make a living will. Talk about it. Death is going to happen to everybody. Write it down. Even if you write it on a piece of paper at home and have your family witness it, you need to write it down.

I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.

Having the choice at the end of my life has become incredibly important. It has given me a sense of peace during a time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain.

Hospice is the Calvary, Hospice means death is not going to be nearly as bad as you think

If I know Mom,' she said, 'she'd have refused any surgery anyhow.' 'It's true,' Amanda said. 'Her advance directive basically asked us to put her out on an ice floe if she developed so much as a hangnail.

She was lying, still and gray, on the bed. A little dribble was coming out of one side of her mouth. Gramps was leaning over her, whispering in her ear. A nurse said, "I don't think she can hear you." "Of course she can hear me," Gramps said. "She'll always be able to hear me.

Because someone needs to help you die the right way," she said. "And we both know that dying ain't something you ever done before.

In health care today, we spend most of the dollars - in terms of treating disease - in the last two years of a person's life.

I hope that when the time comes, I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life's journey in the manner of my choice.

I have interviewed so many people who are put into nursing homes or hospices and are just waiting to die. It's a very lonely situation to just sit at a window and watch life go by.

My patients taught me not how to die, but how to live.

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 problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

In the polls, over 80% support the right to die and have done for the last 25 years. Even 80% of practising Catholics and Protestants support it, plus 76% of Church Times readers.

I work with a group called Compassion & Choices in California. It's attempting to get death with dignity legalised in California, the idea being that so goes California, so goes the rest of the U.S., at least.

Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.