Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death.
Interpretation
Addressing the details of death openly reduces our fear of it.
Sherwin B. Nuland emphasizes that confronting the specific realities of death in a candid manner can alleviate the deep-seated fears associated with it. By exploring and understanding these often-avoided details, we gain insight and clarity, which enables us to approach the concept of death with less dread and more acceptance.
In practice
In a conversation about end-of-life care, this quote can remind participants of the importance of discussing fears.
Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.
Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.
Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression.
I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.
Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.
The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope that we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.
I have not asked for life._x000D_ But I try to accept whatever_x000D_ life brings without surprise._x000D_ And I shall depart again without having_x000D_ questioned anyone about my strange_x000D_ stay here on earth.
Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that
If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.
…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.
'Freedom' means a lot to conservatives, but they have such a narrow sense of what it means. They think a lot about freedom from - freedom from government, freedom from regulation - and precious little about freedom to. Freedom to is absolutely something that has to be safeguarded by good government, just as it could be impaired by bad government.
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