A Bittersweet Season Quotes

“I do not pretend to know who is right. But I do know this: most old people do not want their lives extended beyond reason. They don’t want their adult children changing their diapers. They don’t want to lose their minds and their memories. Give them the chance to tell you that. Don’t try and jolly them out of it. Imagine yourself in their shoes. Love them enough to let them go.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“My mother often mulled the pointless but compulsively compelling question of whether mental decline would be better than physical decline. Wouldn’t being round-the-bend demented be an easier way to go than being paralyzed, losing the ability to talk, becoming incontinent, and being totally aware of every second of it?”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Now, as an adult child, ask yourself: Does either of your parents have a half-million dollars on hand to provide for himself or herself in old age?”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“All the very old people I know, and the vast majority of those who commented on my blog, see long life as a blessing only if they are reasonably functional and not at the mercy of others to get through the day. Once they reach that point of helplessness, with only the rarest exception, they want out.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“The lesson in my friend’s observation is that the line moves. What had once seemed unendurable to an aged parent, and still does to us, the adult children, changes. They come to tolerate the formerly intolerable and to surprise us with their forbearance. Diapers, it turned out, were not the end of the world. Nor was a wheelchair, despite initial resistance. Millimeter by millimeter the line was moving, as it would many times more.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“enlightened geriatric professionals told me that physical therapy had benefits, even absent improvement,”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Because I said so” might work with a child, but it doesn’t work with a parent, and it would be disrespectful besides.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“I didn’t ask any of the right questions,” I said to Dr. Leipzig. “That’s because you didn’t know what questions to ask,” she answered. “You thought the doctors would lead the conversation, and they didn’t.” “I did the best I could. I did the best I could, and it wasn’t good enough.” “That’s because of the system,” Dr. Leipzig said. “You can’t do better than you did in this system. Hold on to that.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Taking care of someone in old age isn’t a job for an amateur, especially if you want some time at the end of your parents’ life to enjoy them, learn more about them, and be a good son or daughter. To”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Before heading home from the Meadowview, with my mother snug in bed, I slumped over the steering wheel, sobbing. Across America, in parking lots like this one, middle-aged daughters do this all the time. I never noticed until I became one of them.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“I keep saying that this experience can become something other than desperate and bleak, if you let it. It really is a choice. We all know grown children who have bolted when the moment arrived. You aren’t one of those, or you wouldn’t be reading this book. But imagining running way doesn’t make you a bad person.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“The typical eighty-five-year-old, geriatric researchers say, can expect more than two years at the end of his life when he is totally dependent on others for the most basic daily activities: getting out of bed, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, eating.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Nell Casey’s anthology An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“How We Die, Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland rails at the “soulless summary” of the death certificate.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Dr. David M. Eddy and his mother made back in 1994, which he chronicled in a now-famous essay in The Journal of the American Medical Association titled “A Conversation with My Mother.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“We treat our pets better than we treat people!” It was a”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“But members of my generation think there is nothing we can’t fix. We can do a full lotus pose, or a century bike race, in our sixties. We can rise to the top of our professions, own real estate, and helicopter-parent our children. But we can’t protect our mothers and fathers from Joanne Lynn’s third trajectory.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“I am old enough to have been taught in early adulthood to always leave a party while you are still a welcome guest. Nowhere is this more important than in life itself.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“inching toward oblivion.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Eventually, they can’t speak, chew and swallow, or use the bathroom—not because those parts of their bodies no longer work but because they can’t remember how.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Living Long in Fragile Health: The New Demographics Shape End of Life Care.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“For someone of her nature, that long, slow, humiliating decline—mentally or physically—was unacceptable.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“The reward for living this long, she often said, and studies support it, is that you get “to rot to death” rather than die.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“end-of-life philosophy: that quality counted, not quantity; that old age wasn’t a disease with a cure; and that she wanted an escape hatch if she needed one.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Now, as the saying goes, they leave sicker and quicker.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“$449 and $471 a day, including room and board,”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“She had a long-term care insurance policy, purchased in 1993 when she was seventy-eight, for almost $7,000 a month, a most unusual expenditure for someone in her age group, that wound up costing a total of $53,600.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“During that span, my mother’s long-term care cost was $609,123, or more than $67,000 a year. This figure does not include doctors’ bills, hospital stays, surgery, or any of the medical care categorized as “acute,” which, as I said, is paid for by Medicare and, in my mother’s case, a supplementary Medigap policy,”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“middle-class poor, which is what most of us will become if we live long enough.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Don’t let the perfect drive out the good”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves