How We Die Quotes

“The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that proceeded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we call all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“-when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then, only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all the things that make us human.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions upon trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died—in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“For many of the dying, intensive care, with its isolation among strangers, extinguishes their hope of not being abandoned in the last hours. If fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel who barely know them.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind’s average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The lesson is never learned—there will always be those who persist in seeking the Fountain of Youth, or at least delaying what is irrevocably ordained.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Dying begins with the first act of life.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Hope can still exist even when rescue is impossible.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“We are not well served by being lulled into unjustified expectations.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“We live today in the era not of the art of dying, but of the art of saving life,”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“Shakespeare has Julius Caesar reflect that: Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“Mine is not the first voice to suggest that as patients, as families, and even as doctors, we need to find hope in other ways, more realistic ways, than in the pursuit of elusive and danger-filled cures. In the care of advanced disease, whether cancer or some other determined killer, hope should be redefined. Some of my sickest patients have taught me of the varieties of hope that can come when death is certain. I wish I could report that there were many such people, but there have, in fact, been few. Almost everyone seems to want to take a chance with the slim statistics that oncologists give to patients with advanced disease. Usually they suffer for it, and they die anyway, having magnified the burdens they and those who love them must carry to the final moments. Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Though their doctors dutifully record such distinct entities as stroke, or cardiac failure, or pneumonia, these aged folk have in fact died because something in them has worn out. Long before the days of scientific medicine, everyone understood this. On July 5, 1814, when he was seventy-one years old, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the seventy-eight-year-old John Adams, "But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for awhile, all will at length surcease motion.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“When my time comes, I will seek hope in the knowledge that insofar as possible I will not be allowed to suffer or be subjected to needless attempts to maintain life; I will seek it in the certainty that I will not be abandoned to die alone; I am seeking it now, in the way I try to live my life, so that those who value what I am will have profited by my time on earth and be left with comforting recollections of what we have meant to one another.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

“When we mourn, it should be the loss of love that makes us grieve, not the guilt that we did something wrong.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Share your optimisms and keep your pessimisms to yourself.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Hope is an abstract word. In fact, it is more than just a word; hope is an abstruse concept, meaning different things to each of us during different times and circumstances of our lives. Even politicians know its hold on the human mind, and the mind of the electorate.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Nature is being kind without knowing it, as nature can be cruel without knowing it.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Human beings are capable of the kind of love and loyalty that transcends not only the physical debasement but even the spiritual weariness of the years of sorrow.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“There is no way to deter old age from its grim duty, but a life of accomplishment makes up in quality for what it cannot add in quantity.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“The only certainty, whether spoken or not, is that the doctors, nurses, and technicians are fighting not only death but their own uncertainties as well. In most resuscitations, those can be narrowed down to two main questions: Are we doing the right things? and, Should we be doing anything at all?”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

“To the wise advice that we live every day as though it will be our last, we do well to add the admonition to live every day as though we will be on this earth forever.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter