Quotes About Mortality

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.

Spending one's final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said good-bye or "It's okay" or "I'm sorry" or "I love you.

As medical progress has extended our lives, the result has been what's called the "rectangularization" of survival.

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

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness and old age make the struggle hard enough.

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.

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

But the fact of eight deaths must mean something, right?

It was estimated that, nationwide, upward of forty-four thousand patients die each year at least partly as a result of errors in care.

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

Research has found that loss of bone density may be an even better predictor of death from atherosclerotic disease than cholesterol levels.

There's no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born.

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.

In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.

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.

So today, with our average life span in much of the world climbing past eighty years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time.

In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality.

In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness

Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety thousand die of that infection. The

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.

believe that the difference in death rates can be traced to the fundamental human need for a reason to live.