That Good Night Quotes

“For we will each age and die, as my father told me years ago. We will lose the people we love. No matter our ethnicity, place of residence, income, religion, or skin color, our human lives are united by brevity and finitude, and the certainty of loss. Just as we strive for dignity and purpose throughout our lives, well before the light fades, we can bring this same dignity and purpose to our deaths, as we each journey into our own good night.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“What if I regarded my own death with reverence instead of fear? I wondered. Or, even more radically, what if I had some sort of gratitude for the transience of my life? Would it change what I worried and cared about? Wasn’t it necessary to think about this when I was in the midst of building a life? Or rather, living my life? And the more I thought about mortality and what it had come to mean to others and what I thought it meant to me, I realized that life was simultaneously so vast and so small.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Lacking the language to discuss mortality is the ultimate way of erasing it.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“God’s call. A tiny phrase I had never heard in a medical conversation. Two words that said something enormous, eternal: dying is spiritual, not just medical. The moment of death can be sacred.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“God’s purpose is not to erase human suffering, but instead to teach you how to overcome whatever life might bring.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“all religions are simply different pathways to the same place, that every faith is built around similar lessons: live kindly and compassionately, with regard for the well-being of others.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“What if I regarded my own death with reverence instead of fear? I wondered. Or, even more radically, what if I had some sort of gratitude for the transience of my life? Would it change what I worried and cared about? Wasn’t it necessary to think about this when I was in the midst of building a life? Or rather, living my life? And the more I thought about mortality and what it had come to mean to others and what I thought it meant to me, I realized that life was simultaneously so vast and so small.
It was daybreak after a good sleep and exhaustion as the stars emerged. It was the first crisp bite of an apple, the taste of butter on toast. It was the way a tree's shadow moved along the wall of a room as the afternoon passed. It was the smell of a baby's skin, the feeling of a heart fluttering with anticipation or nerves. It was the steady rhythm of a lover's breathing during sleep. It was both solitude in a wide green field and the crowding together of bodies in a church. It was equally common and singular, a shared tumult and a shared peace. It was the many things I'd ignored or half appreciated as I chased the bigger things. It was infinity in a seashell.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“We all hope for miracles, all the time,” I said slowly. “But I sometimes have to remind myself what a miracle really is. It’s something truly unexpected, something that usually does not happen. It’s something really exceptional. Which is why it’s a miracle. I completely understand why you are hoping and praying for a miracle. I would do the same. But I also want to make sure we have another plan in place if the miracle isn’t part of God’s plan for Jack.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Though my profession relied on science to halt the ways that nature affects and afflicts the human body, perhaps it was equally important to realize when trying to outsmart nature would inflict a different sort of suffering on my patients. It seemed to me that one of my most important responsibilities would be to know and remind myself of this difference.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“The soul wears the body like a cloth and discards it at the time of death.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“I’d learned was that living required both humility and acceptance of the unexpected.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Maybe it meant surrendering the complete control we assume we have over our lives, and instead opening to the idea that another force, benevolent and mysterious, looked after us. Maybe it meant practicing acceptance of whatever life brings our way. And maybe it also meant remembering that our sorrows and joys, just like our bodies, were temporary”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Were we so blinded by the shiny allure and promise of technology and scientific innovation that we’d convinced ourselves we could defy nature, overlook the common human experience of death and suffering? Were we so focused on learning facts and procedures that we’d forgotten to consider medicine’s limits?”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Acceptance is a small, quiet room, Cheryl Strayed wrote”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“You want to tell them that these people described freedom from their diseased bodies as being enveloped in pure, divine love, finally free of suffering. We never wanted to return to our earthly bodies, they tell you later.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“You want to tell them that their bodies will die, but they won’t. That it is their bodies, not their spirits, that are finite, mortal. You want to tell them that you have had patients who have had near-death experiences, who have hovered above their bodies as medical teams performed CPR and experienced the purest joy and freedom they have ever known.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“There is no script, no training course, that can teach you how to sit in silence, how to listen to them. You either have a deep well of your own suffering—your own intersecting, interlocked circles of loss, grief, anger, fear, sadness, regret—to draw upon, or you have a well of suffering that you have not recognized or are not ready to draw upon. We all have our suffering.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“You imagine that each of them wears a necklace of intricate, intersecting circles of loss, grief, anger, fear, sadness, regret. You visualize this necklace hanging at their throats, golden and glistening under the hospital’s fluorescent lights, in the moments when their expressions of emotion make you want to leave the room. This is a necklace that you choose to wear, too.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

“Family meetings are a procedure,” a prominent palliative care physician named Susan Block had once said, “and they require no less skill than performing an operation.”
― Sunita Puri, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour