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5516e14
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Far from being irreplaceable, we should be replaced. Fantasies of staying the hand of mortality are incompatible with the best interests of our species and the continuity of humankind's progress. More directly, they are incompatible with the best interests of our very own children. Tennyson says it clearly: "Old men must die; or the world would grow moldy, would only breed the past again."
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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01542e9
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if peace and dignity are what we delude ourselves to expect, most of us will die wondering what we, or our doctors, have done wrong.
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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a5e1c25
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The originator of the literary form we call the essay, the sixteenth-century Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, was a social philosopher who viewed mankind through the scrutinizing lens of unadorned and unforgiving reality and heard its self-deceits with the ear of the skeptic. In his fifty-nine years, he gave much thought to death, and wrote of the necessity to accept each of its various forms as being equally natural: "Your death is a part of..
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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8c23826
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the last hours. In fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel who barely know them.
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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461b535
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Although it is not always admitted, the hospital has offered families a place where they can hide the unseemly invalid whom neither the world nor they can endure. ... The hospital has become the place of solitary death.
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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929911d
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bioengineers but by those who know who we are.
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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774ba71
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It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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ca61271
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All along the way, family members have been experiencing feelings of ambivalence, helplessness, and crisis. They fear what they are seeing, as well as what they have yet to see. No matter how often they are reminded, many people persist in believing they are permitting conscious suffering. And yet, it is always so hard to let go. Such legal instruments as living wills and durable power of attorney may function as so-called advance directive..
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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1d741cf
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The virus has robbed them of their youth, and it is about to rob them of the rest of their
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Sherwin B. Nuland |
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0435dfb
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Tradition is a persuasive teacher, even when what it teaches is erroneous.
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Sherwin B. Nuland |