Dancing with Mister D Quotes

“The motives for sitting up nights on end with the dying are often dubious. A repentant son who never visited his mother more than once a year now takes the opportunity to punish himself for his neglect by not stirring from her side for nights on end, though the poor woman is hardly there any longer in her dying body. For just as at birth we die head first.”
― Bert Keizer, Dancing with Mister D: Notes on Life and Death

“Usually, people die unknowingly. Come to think of it, can you die knowingly? Putting it akwardly: We are died as we are delivered. Nobody delivers himself on this planet, just as nobody dies himself off it. So dying is hard to define. The most satisfactory idea is that of a struggle near the exit, after which you are let through.”
― Bert Keizer, Dancing with Mister D: Notes on Life and Death

“The patient suffers; the family threatens; the colleagues frown; the nurse laughs; Death grins; and the young doctor dances a crazy jig amid the tumult, though once he dreamed he would glide along the floor with Death in a perfectly controlled tango.”
― Bert Keizer, Dancing with Mister D: Notes on Life and Death