79 Quotes About End-of-life

By acknowledging my impermanence, I can consider if there is anything I can do now to help my loved ones who will be left behind cope with losing me and to facilitate healing.

Of course it’s always possible to gain time, put up a front, try to last it out - how long, a year, eighteen months? I’d rather leave the arena before I am beaten to a pulp and have to be dragged out. One has to know how to accept the inevitable.

Slowly I felt flooded with that agonizing and poignant confusion that surely comes to all aging men experiencing their first adolescent love. I had no great wish to go on living; what was the point of a flawed happiness. According to Bonnard, the hardest moment of all is when the artist longs to keep on but he’s conscience tells him that one brushstroke more will spoil the entire painting. And man has to know when to stop.

Losing the buffer zone of my parents meant I was next. I had a chance to craft a lighter finale for my future senior years. I didn’t want the final chapters of my life to be about stuff, and I didn’t want to abandon the responsibility of dealing with it myself.

Sobran wondered whether the angel was trying to follow his feelings about age or those of humans in general. He felt that he had to get his answer right, so he thought for a time before he told Xas, "It's as if I can no longer fit the space I've made for myself in the world. Yes--I've shrunk inside the space I've made.

Hi lover," he says to me, completely forgetting what happened before.He knows who I am. He knows that I am the one person who he loves, has always loved. No disease, no person can take that away.(p.205)

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes traveling wonderful for me, the reason I defied everyone. The two of us together like we have always been, not saying anything, not doing anything special, just on vacation. I know nothing lasts, but even when you know that things are just about over, sometimes you can run back and take a little bit more and no one will notice.

Know this: even if you’re like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you’re dead by now. (p.125 )

Everyone for whom I would have cried has already died.