Quotes About Aging

Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room.

LOU SANDERS WAS on his way to joining the infantilized and catatonic denizens belted into the wheelchairs of a North Andover nursing home

The earliest portions to shrink are generally the frontal lobes, which govern judgment and planning, and the hippocampus, where memory is organized. As a consequence, memory and the ability to gather and weigh multiple ideas—to multitask—peaks in midlife and then gradually declines.

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.

MODERN SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITY has profoundly altered the course of human life. People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals

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.

They experienced trials, to be sure, and more moments of poignancy--that is, of positive and negative emotion mixed together. But overall, they found living to be a more emotionally satisfying and stable experience as time passed, even as old age narrowed the lives they led...The common view was that these lessons are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.

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

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.

Nursing homes have come a long way from the firetrap warehouses of neglect they used to be. But it seems we've succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life of worth and freedom is simply not possible.

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

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—

our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives.

Wilson is still trying to work out how ordinary people can age without having to choose between neglect and institutionalization. It remains among the most uncomfortable questions we face.

daughter, if the parents survived into senescence. This was the lot of the poet Emily Dickinson, in Amherst, Massachusetts

Making lives meaningful in old age is new. It therefore requires more imagination and invention than making them merely safe does.

People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. And we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it.

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.

medically dominated culture of care for the elderly.

En la vejez y la enfermedad se requieren dos tipos de valor. El primero es el valor para afrontar la realidad de la mortalidad –el valor de querer saber la verdad de lo que cabe temer y lo que cabe esperar–

And the insight was that as people's capacities wane, whether through age or ill health, making their lives better often requires curbing our purely medical imperatives—resisting the urge to fiddle and fix and control. It was not hard to see how important this idea could be for the patients I encountered in my daily practice—people facing mortal circumstances at every phase of life.

This is normal. Although the processes can be slowed—diet and physical activity can make a difference—they cannot be stopped.

The aged did not lose status and control so much as share it. Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It